Go Back In Time
There’s this photo from Calgary Zoo—a kid making the face you make when a dinosaur with a ridiculous stitched beard gets inches from your nose. She’s squinting, totally committed to whatever she’s experiencing. I can’t stop looking at it.
It’s promotional, Jurassic Park dinosaurs in Canada. T-Rex, Triceratops, Eoraptor—the ones I cared about as a kid. They’re walking around, alive-ish, which doesn’t make sense but that’s the appeal. You know it’s costumes. You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway.
What gets me is her face. She hasn’t learned yet that dinosaurs are supposed to be outgrown. She just sees something that doesn’t compute and reacts honestly. No irony. Pure confusion.
I keep coming back to it. The costume, the stitched beard, the fact that she doesn’t look away.