Bronto

If anyone tells you this world isn’t bizarre as hell, don’t believe them. They’re probably trying to sell you something. Like toothpaste, maybe. Or a laptop. Anyway, this brontosaurus lives on Dodge Street, in front of an old Sinclair gas station. The only other place I’ve seen a Sinclair brontosaurus like this is Boulder, Colorado.

The Sinclair dinosaur is about as close as a petroleum company can get to outright acknowledgment that petroleum is a limited natural resource made up of ancient dead plants and animals. There’s no tiger in your tank, in other words, but there’s trilobites and pteradactyls. I think about that every time I drive up Dodge Street and see Mr. Bronto checkin’ out the scene. I imagine a zoo full of weird, archaic life forms compressed and reduced to a stringent goo that gets processed into fuel, then combusted in an engine.

It’s a curse. It’s a blessing. But being a human means having the most superior consciousness of all the beings on the planet. Which means that it’s our lot in life to be in constant perception of a place – this solar system - that’s so weird and unpredictable that it gave rise to us when it could have just as easily gotten along fine without us. And the existentialist Sinclair Bronto sings, “Whatever you choose to do with that awareness is up to you, daddy-o.” And I says back to him, “Whoa!”