Notes From the Land of the Dinosaurs

I like to think I deal with change pretty well. I consider it as a positive. Skirts go up, skirts go down, ties are skinny, wide, what’s a tie? Every time I like a product, they pull it from the market. I grumble, then adjust, find a new product.

Remember fax machines? Hey, I remember a world before TV remotes. A world where you actually had to get up from your chair and physically change the knob. I even remember twisting those funny antennas called rabbit ears to get a better TV signal. But hey ,life moves on. I adapt.

When I heard that Pluto was no longer considered a planet, I took it like a man. I remember when I learned that Continental Drift was no longer just a theory, but a fact, When Pan Am and TWA went under, I was shaken, but I reconciled. When the original Oreos branched out into a double cream version, I embraced it. Chat GPT? An early adopter. What happened to all the great guitar solos? Still I was right there.

Some people are stuck at a certain age. If it wasn’t around in ‘71 I don’t abide with it kind of thing. They think Taylor Swift might be one of the merry men of Sherwood. Sort of like King Charles is about architecture.

I thought I was dealing with it pretty well. It all started when something came from left field that completely threw me. Pi. Remember Pi? That concept you never really understood, but you knew cloudily was  3.14, with a whole bunch of digits after that. Pi was immutable 

Oh no, not so fast, buddy.  You are so yesterday! It’s 22/7. Any school child knows that. Suddenly I felt like I was back when Nicolaus Copernicus announced that the earth moves around the sun. The question of course is (given that it is in essence the same thing) why that in particular should have hit me, considering that my grasp of mathematics is, to be kind, shaky.

I guess there comes a breaking point. For some it’s hair, long, beards, whatever. For me it’s a concept I never understood in the first place. And suddenly you say. Hold on. Wait. I don’t understand the world anymore, But I stop myself

Evolution. Change, even if it sometimes verges on the ridiculous. like bright red feathers, might bring a new improved model. A beak that can deal with the food source. Flight. Which is why I thought I liked change even at its most ridiculous.

Then I ran into this under some rubble:

Notes From the Land of Dinosaurs

We watched the volcano for some time. Sure, it rumbled occasionally, but mostly it just sat there. We thought it was indigestion, so we went back to the task at hand, lumbering around, searching out food, eyeing up one another.

From as far back as I could remember everyone assumed that we and that lump of stone had a kind of understanding. We knew it would belch occasionally, and we would pretend not to hear it nor smell all that sulphur on its breath.

It went on like that for a long time, nothing pretty much happening. Then one day a young carnivore announced he’d heard that we could grow feathers. He said he thought that sounded kind of a cool idea. But he didn’t do much about it. Anyway. most of us didn’t fancy the idea.

It was an unusually warm day, almost too hot. The sun burned through a haze until it was high in the sky. We had just finished lunch, well, actually the carnivores had finished; we herbivores take forever to eat. There’s a particularly succulent group of Cycads and Ginkgoes that  grows along the mountainside. So not naming names some of us had gorged ourselves silly that day.

Eventually we each found a shady spot to sleep off our over-full bellies and were dosing peacefully when slowly we became aware of a deep rumbling sound. At first we thought it must be the mountain with its digestive problems, but the sound kept building until it was almost deafening. Those of us with arms tried to cover our ears. The others rushed to protect them with leaves and branches.

The roar kept growing louder and louder  until there was a cracking sound. And suddenly the fiery breath of the mountain spewed toward us. Burning like a furnace, singing our olfactory lobes.

The dinosaur who told us about the feathers screamed we should all try to go underground, which those of us who could run did. And we stayed there. Every once in a while, one of the brave ones tried to peek out, but immediately pulled back because of the intensely burning heat.

Still, after a while the air began to cool and cautiously, we came out of hiding and surveyed the damage. Because there’d been almost nothing to eat  just some singed bulbs for the herbivores, there were fewer of us  and we’d all lost weight and energy.  And  while at first the carnivores had done well underground, becoming fattened on all the barbequed carcases. Eventually they’d run out of rotten meat, and they too began dying off, until only a few carnivores survived to go out in the world.

Once outside we began to recover somewhat, though we were more wary that was for sure. At first we were delighted it was becoming cooler, but there came a point when we wanted it to stop. It didn’t stop, though. It was like winter, only worse, killing off all the plants. Those few who had adopted feathers did fare better. They could use their beaks to scratch under the ground.

Then, just when we thought it couldn’t get worse, a huge glowing object appeared in the sky. It was speeding towards us, burning, fiery, crashing to earth and shattering into millions of scorching pieces. And suddenly the blazing fragments coalesced, blotting out the light, the plants, the sun, the sky. It blotted out us.

We dinosaurs who have lived through changes can read the runes and know we all better start digging

TURNING POINTS from Crowd-Writing

a book by Shelley Katz

Out Now