feeds them--even if it's extinct and does not,
strictly speaking, have any hands.
I keep thinking about cars lately. The way they fly down roads at speeds no one would have once thought the human body can travel. The terrifying and exhilarating amount of momentum they generate. The way they colonize the land, making us make them asphalt rivers across our valleys, concrete palaces beside or below our busiest buildings. Who serves who, I wonder, in the relationship between the cars and us?
They are fueled by the ghosts of the dead, if I understand correctly: gas is made from the long-compressed remains of the dinosaurs and the plants of their prehistoric homes. To pour a potion made from the remains of the dead into worked ore torn from below the surface of the earth in order to transcend the natural barriers presented by great distance sounds more like some kind of magical incantation than like science, I realize, and yet who is to say that this is not a strange and magical world we live in?
And who is to say that those old spirits of those departed dinosaurs have not possessed our metallic idols? Who is to say they haven't returned to fill and rule the world?
I watch the roads and see trucks lumber down them like sauropods, motorcycles darting in and out of traffic like raptors. Have we engineered a seance that has gotten out of control?
One day, perhaps, we will fuel the future.
ReplyDeleteIt's the revolution.
you're making me miss Pat, my crippled Apatosaurus (say what you will, that's the name I prefer over Brontosaurus.) Remember that horrible time that someone stuffed her in a garbage can at church, and we searched all over until Dad finally found her? Just because one leg wouldn't inflate didn't mean she was no good!
ReplyDeleteCan global warming then be perceived as the effort of the universe to keep the dead in their graves?
ReplyDeleteIf the spirits of the dinosaurs have returned to fill the earth, has the spirit of the cataclysm that destroyed them returned as well?
Global warming is actually a desperate Canadian bid for world domination. But that's another story for another day.
ReplyDeleteIt's like when we were learning about farming in Project, perhaps we domesticated plants, but maybe the plants domesticated us. I mean like bees pollenate flowers, we cultivate plants which means it's easier for those plants to live, right? Like a survival technique.
ReplyDeleteOr that thing about dogs being the dominate species, but they realized they could get people to feed them and take care of them if the people thought they were in charge. Which is a lie though - there are a lot of street dogs in Thailand, in pretty rough shape. Anyways...
I feel used.
Your article is hilarious!
ReplyDeleteNate