Dinosaur content!

My house is a fucking insane asylum right now. Two days ago I was told that my wife’s best friend from highschool would be coming to town. This, it turns out was only part of the story. The whole story goes something like this: She was coming to town Wednesday (yesterday) and bringing her husband and two kids and they were all staying here in our apartment, which is nice, but relatively small even for my own family of four and two dogs. Now that there are eight humans and two canines, shit’s pretty Chinese up in here (not because we’re gonna eat the dogs, just because of the crowding).

I slept in a room with my baby last night and she’s pretty chill, but she beeps and squeaks all night long and the results are not good for a person with my sensitive sleep habits. My bigger kid got up at six and (to borrow a phrase from the pornography industry) I’m bushed. I’ve had a whole pot of coffee and seen all the buttholes on Isanyoneup and it’s not even 8. The real dickpunch is that our guests, who are sleeping in my room, are still asleep even as my own children rove the halls and bathrooms like stray, screaming gremlins. My jealousy knows no bounds.

Today, I’ll go to the museum and show some kids some dinosaurs. Those little motherfuckers love them some dinosaurs, boy. It’s astounding how much kids give a shit about history when that history involves this entire planet being overrun with gigantic lizard/bird monsters. However, I don’t understand what the fascination is, or more to the point, why the fascination is ALWAYS dinosaurs. Don’t get me wrong, as a kid, dinosaurs were my favorite historical personages too. But why?

Let’s take my three year old kid as a case study. He loves dinosaurs. Some of his favorites are the T-rex, the spinosaurus and the stygimoloch (I know! What the fuck? They came out with new dinosaurs? How the fuck does that happen [Ugh…I know how it happens, so please, nerds with interests in paleontology and a lack of ability to understand rhetorical questions posed only for the sake of highlighting seeming absurdity, please stand down {funny, completely unrelated side note: we were on tour with American Steel and Rory was getting all pissy about the amount of guestlist spots that they were gonna have in their hometown of SF. We were splitting the spots right down the middle, as that’s where our record label is and we have lots of friends, but we dig that it’s home for them, so we gave them half the total spots even though we were technically ¾ of the show and the headliners and blah blah blah. Pretty nice, right? Well, Rory wasn’t having it and he was kind of throwing a fit, so Buttcheeks, American Steel’s guitarist, busted in and said “Rory, what don’t you understand? These are how many spots we get, and it’s fine” to which Rory replied, in an extremely loud and frustrated voice, “Ryan! Stand down!” Now, I’m no expert on interpersonal communication, but uh…’stand down’? That’s the kind of shit you say to an uppity slave or a misbehaving dog, not a peer. Needless to say, we died laughing and now tell each other to ‘stand down’ all the time}]).

I understand that the idea of dinosaurs is crazy. I mean if someone from space looked objectively at the earth in the context of galactic history, they would undoubtedly refer to it as “that one gigantic lizard planet that had those monkeys come out and destroy it right there at the end” and that kind of boggles the mind. We’re living in the remnants of a very successful society of lizards and that is an unusual reality to come to grips with.

But see, that’s because I’ve got a relatively huge amount of perspective when it comes to the expectations of what this planet is. My kid has no real notions about pandas or WWII memorabilia or a chimichanga or skeleton keys or a double rainbow or mushroom clouds or naked boobs or hockey or mazes or lobsters or France or anything and frankly I don’t understand why dinosaurs are the things that stuck so instantly. Couldn’t, theoretically, anything be that fascinating if you’ve never seen it before? Why is it always dinosaurs for these kids? I mean, I guess the easy answer is that there aren’t shows about mushroom clouds that are aimed at entertaining them, but there was a time when there weren’t shows about dinosaurs either. That developed in response to a groundswell of interest from the under-ten set. Pretty fucking weird, right? Right? No? Yes? Hellooooooo?

Oh, just stand down everyone. It’s gonna be a long day.