Friday, July 6, 2001

Dinosaurs Still Rule the Earth (by Ben Kline)

Simply by noticing the sheer amount of fermented dinosaur blood involved in the everyday processes of so-called-civilization, you can begin to hear my argument. The miracle of Miracle Whip, the twinkle in a Twinkie, wall to wall carpeting and the Lycra in your undies, Tupperware and/or lipstick, asphalt and/or condoms.

Okay so it was mostly all the ferns, bacterium, seaweed an' shit that composted into our trinity of crude, coal and "natural" gas, but evidently it's only the top of the food chain that matters, so whenever I see an S.U.V. barreling by the neighborhood cul-de-sac, it's a snortin' stompin' brontosaurus eatin' T-rex that I envision. Ice ages of pressure and heat that only magma from the center of the earth could produce, transmogrifying blood, bones and bryophytes into rich Texas tea.

Seemingly endless stretches of black asphalt akin to rivers of coagulated blood. Plastic, oh glorious plastic, you are skin. Coal is petrified bone; the natural gas was passed from their ass. Insects gather in the halo of wasted light, shining bright into a deserted night, a sacrifice. Praise Ford, Lee Iacocca for President, please let the car take me there. Steel cages envelope the flesh, solid sliding ka-chunk of a mini-van door slammed shut by the shin guard clad youth, who aspires to own his own someday. Strapping his strapping wee ass into the Naugahyde enveloped pew with a nylon seatbelt at the command of his mother, who is comforted by the sounds of automatic locks. A feeling of security is achieved with two thousand pounds of steel between her and all those other damned people on the road. Sixty-Five miles an hour on a highway maintained by our government and we'll buy whatever the hell we can to feel assured of life after driving. Who the hell cares about a little warming of the globe anyway, I gotta git my kid to soccer.

Gasoline is cheaper than milk. The radio commercial is telling you not to worry, to ignore the fire in your kitchen, to gaze upon the glorious silicone breast that is Pepsi, history is on your side; progress.

There was a time in between the Jurassic and this, the second coming where mammals of the sapiens sort lived without the aid of fire from beneath the ground, but right around the birth of queen-to-be Victoria, machines first made their presence known, and from corn combine to the computer their march has hitherto run ceaselessly, unendingly. John Henry died; the steam drill ran on. Assuredly as coal churned in its belly, Dick Cheney's new pacemaker ensures the mile long trains of the cold black coal mined from train lengths beneath the deepest tree root will continue to choo-choo along to the blazing power plants, power plants that measure their consumption with the t.l.a. (three letter acronym) t.p.h. (tons per hour). Dick Cheney is from Wyoming; Wyoming is one big-ass cube of coal.

With, at last I heard, thirty years left to assuage environmental catastrophe of the planetary level, it might be time to start riding your bike to soccer, but since, at the other last hearing, you only have to accept some Christ fella into your pacemaker in order to hop the bandwagon offa this merry-go-round, why worry about 110 degree weather? I mean really, I'll be as dead as the stegosaurus that provided the electricity for this essay by the time anything really bad happens. I have a creepy feeling that heaven is just right up there on the dark side of the moon. All the rich popular pretty people who went to seminary class before the sun rose get to go when they're around 80 or whatever, they get an angel pill that keeps `em alive forever. The whole bit: virgins, ambrosia, harp music and Elvis, all under pressurized geodesic domes. The conspiracy isn't that we didn't go to the moon at all, it's that we quit going after like, 15 missions. Don't worry; everything that the rich guys decide to do over golf or in some secret society is part of the plan. God made dinosaurs, right? On purpose even...

The sheer insanity of painted lines and flashing colored lights guiding this chimpanzee with a handgun. Piloting all that inertia with a rack and pinion steering wheel and friction brakes. "Hands at ten and two, defensive driving now people!" Fuckin' glorified go-karts lumbering through the urban jungle. Power lines draped like vines and canyon walls of concrete. The sheer flatulent waste of the terrible lizards married to the unthinking hegemony of an ant colony.

Dinosaurs rule the earth. In spirit, as we pilot steel shells of their armor plated ghosts, running off the actual molecules of their blood. Politically, progress is the same to a modern republican as it was to Queen Victoria, apparently to not change our wasteful culture at all. Like a CD in a microwave, humanity is burning up its terrarium from the inside out. Geologically three seconds is all the time humans have been here, let's see if we can't let the dinosaurs continued rule wipe us out as well.


Ben Kline has the nicest garden in town.

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