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Good morning, people of Seattle! It’s another gorgeous day in the Emerald City, clear skies, highs of seventy-four, gentle breeze dancing up off the Puget Sound. Thank you for my breakfast, little tugboat with your barge full of meaty cows! It’s a wonderful day to be a modern urban Tyrannosaur! Oh sweet Dinosaur Jesus how I love the feel of the cool water on my pebbly dry skin! I love the bay, it’s perfect for me, I can stomp around as much as I want without smashing your streets and in the heat of the day I can lay out and soak up the sun and salt and ancient minerals. You stupid scientists, thinking I wouldn’t enjoy water? Assuming I must be cold-blooded and lethargic like all your sorry little “reptiles” down there? Thinking you can sort me out just by looking at some dusty old bones in the ground? I love you but you’re so silly. I do what I want, friends. I’m not a “reptile”, I’m me! I’m a T. Rex, dammit! RAWR! The tugboat reaches its “proximity limit” and halts, detaches the barge, and turns around. A couple of the crewmen on deck wave at me and I smile big. They run back inside. Moo, says the cow. Chomp chomp! No more moo. The tugboat retreats as fast as it can but I’m not insulted. Look at my incredible rack of teeth, I’m like a walking sawmill! I would run away from me too! I splash around in the bay in a fit of pure pleasure, just swinging my tail and gnashing at the sweet warm sun. It’s so good to be alive. People’s terror didn’t bother me when I showed up in Seattle. Of course they were afraid of me; there was—and still is!—a pretty good chance that I’d eat them! I do my best now days and try to stick to just cows but I’m not perfect. It’s only natural that they should be scared—sometimes I’m scared of myself! The only thing that bothered me was their incredulity. Their shock that I even existed. Why shouldn’t I exist? Who says I’m extinct? Don’t you people realize that you don’t know anything? I was disappointed by all the furor and astonishment. The tranquilizer darts I took in stride, pretended to sleep and let them study me for a while, but I was hurt. Why can’t you people just go with it? Just laugh and celebrate the arrival of something you never expected? RAWR! I leaped to my feet and snapped all their ropes and tie-downs. I ate a few of them, sure, but did they expect any less? It wasn’t a big deal. Besides, I apologized later by defending them from that alien attack. Yes the military could have brought in jets and blasted those lumbering horrors, but not before they ate up a hundred good downtown folks! I was napping in the bay when they rose up from the depths so I just went ahead and battled them. I enjoyed the symmetry of the fight—big grey monsters with long burly arms and tiny soft mouths, my perfect opposites! As if nature had matched us up to compare the effectiveness of our unique features! Lucky for you people, it turns out giant toothy mouths win. RAWR! The story of how I won everyone’s trust and earned a piece of watery real estate with daily food service is long and boring. YAWN! But I think we’ve struck a nice little bargain. They feed me, I exercise in the bay, sometimes I even help out in the shipping yards, loading and unloading cargo too big and awkward for the dock cranes. I try to use my forearms to lift sometimes, trying to bulk them up a little. People always assume that animals don’t have to work for their physiques, but that’s just another human myth to make the lazy and overweight feel better about themselves. So I was hatched with stimbly little arms; that doesn’t mean I can’t improve my lot! I don’t have to accept anything I don’t want to accept, I’m a T. Rex, dammit! I’m not limited by genetics, not even by species, I can do or be whatever I want! If I want to bad enough I can turn myself into a fucking bird! TWEET! I don’t remember very clearly how I got here, I just remember crashing out of the trees down by the industrial district and leaping onto I-5 for a big theatrical entrance. TADA! A few cars crashed into my legs but it only hurt a little. They mostly just bounced off, and the rest I scattered with my tail. Did I mention I’m a lot bigger than most of your stupid fossils? The skeletons in your museums were the smallest and weakest of us, the nerds and wusses, why do you think they died in the first place? The rest of us are still alive! Out there in the hidden corners of the earth, the mysterious islands and lost worlds and lands before time, places you wouldn’t know anything about because you decided you’re no longer ignorant and quit learning. Of course we’re still alive! We’re T. Rexes! A few million years, what’s that? Who cares about that? The inevitability of old age and death is a human idea, built from human despair and now spread to most of the natural world. You silly people. Don’t you know that even humans used to live thousands of years? Most creatures used to choose their last day on earth. But I’m not here to rebuke you or bore you with nostalgia for the good old days. I’m happy to be here in Seattle and I look forward to my next chance to show how much I love you. Aliens, volcanoes, giant terrorist robots, they’re all the same to me. I’ll eat them, I’ll disarm them, I’ll plug their fiery craters with a big rock, because that’s why I’m here! That’s what I choose to do for you! Sometimes I might even go on a little rampage and smash a few of your buildings if I feel like you need it, and maybe you’ll hate me for a little while but I hope you’ll understand I only do it out of love, not just “tough love”, which is weak, but dinosaur love, which is strong enough to bite through a tank! I pray to Dinosaur Jesus every night that I can share my deep joy with all you sad, depressive people. The more you cry and complain, the more you dramatize your silly little travails, the deeper you sink into yourself and your bottomless self-obsessed narcissism, the more I want to chomp you around the middle and shake you side to side and swing you up toward the sun and say, Look! Look at that beautiful sky! Look at all the beautiful people on the street around you, all with their own problems and concerns but still breathing and walking and evolving taller and smarter every day. I want to toss you up in the air and catch you in my jaws and say, look at me! My brain is smaller than a lemon but I understand all the deeper mysteries of creation! I’ve crashed through Cretaceous jungles and splashed through pools of primordial ooze, patiently weathered meteors and ice ages and the choking black clouds of your smoke stacks as you rose up on your hind legs and started picking up femurs and bashing your skulls open. At first you were honest about that, just like I’m honest when I eat you or kill my fellow dinosaurs over some necessary carcass—but then you complicated yourselves and tried to paint over reality instead of embracing it or replacing it, and maybe that’s why I showed up and ate some of you and smashed over some buildings with my tail, to be a reminder of reality, the wild, wide-open jungle of it, and to make you look past your funny little pink and brown noses. More cows! Bring me more cows! My hunger is my joy; the happier I get, the hungrier! Bring me something to fight! A monster, a spaceship, an invading nation with impure hearts! I’m tired of talking, I want action! I want to show you all what I can do, how my jaws can crush concrete, how my excellent binocular vision can see you from any angle, peering into your adorable little souls, how I can leap hundreds of feet into the air and catch your senseless missiles in my teeth! Oh it’s so good, being here, being me! Come out here in my bay on your boats and rafts and summertime floaties, come out and dance and cheer around me, splash water in the air and make rainbows in the spray and celebrate everything you should be celebrating all the time! I will help you! I will let you ride on me, hug my neck and cling to my scales and we’ll splash through the oceans and thunder down the freeways and leap through the ancient jungles while the apes and birds playfully race us, and we’ll be T. Rexes together! RAAAAWR!
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