Welcome to today’s Mortality Lesson… Jurassic Park Edition.

Non-avian dinosaurs went kaput about 66 million years ago. Sorry— that’s 3,443,785,714.3 Mondays ago.
Dino extinction isn’t news to anyone here, unless you are a child, in which case you shouldn’t be reading this blog because the f-word comes up from time to time. (For example: all the birds flapping around out there today are like, “those dinosaurs sure got fucked 3,443,785,714.3 Mondays ago! We’re so lucky!”) (👈The birds are not lucky, what with the global crisis of 40% to 50% of species in decline due to planetary issues. But I digress!)

👆This picture represents a day in the life of a green dinosaur, having a carcass of some sort. See how happy he is in this “before” picture?

👆This “after” picture features one small modification. Can you make it out? The dinosaur was oblivious. And then he was burned all to hell by the meteor known as the “Chicxulub Impactor,” which really should be the name of a middling band.

👆This poor, naive pterodactyl. He was in the air and should’ve seen the meteor before all his non-flying friends, but you can tell by the look on his face that he was a little dim. And then poof! Pterodactyl dust.

👆Here is another green dinosaur (the dinosaur color palette range seemed pretty limited; sorry I couldn’t jazz these Mesozoic creatures up with a bit of purple). He’s just as oblivious as the others. One minute, grazing. The next minute, green gonzo!

👆Here is a “before” rendition of Dino Happy Hour. They look happy, don’t they, bitching about their bosses, musing about where to get a decent tooth-sharpening dentist?

👆Here is the almost-after. Three fossils-in-the-making.

The dinosaurs didn’t know Mr. Chicxulub Impactor was going to pulverize them. If they did, would they have savored their grazing and flying and shooting the shit together even more? Maybe? Probably. After shitting their big dinosaur pants.

Animals (apparently) do not understand their mortality, even on a bland day when a fiery meteor with a death wish isn’t careening towards the planet. But us humans—we know. Oh, how we like to pretend we don’t! But we know. And here is the opportunity for us… here is where we can let the lessons of the ignorant dinosaurs serve us.

Our time is coming. It’s statistically unlikely to involve a catastrophic ending, if that makes you feel better. We don’t know how we’re going to die, we don’t know when we’re going to die, but we do know why we’re going to die (the answer is “because no one gets out of here alive”). So let this be a clarion call to get on with this business of being alive, before you are very much not.

Go enjoy your existence before you go the way of the dinosaurs. Go live like you mean it, so that if an unfathomably enormous shooting star enters the atmosphere with the clear intention of making mincemeat out of you (very crispy mincemeat), you can look up at the sky and say, “come and get me! I did this life justice.” What a satisfying sound that would be—the vaporization of someone who killed life before it killed them.