The Last Dinosaur (#142)
Before we, too, become someone’s trinket to fondly remember and paint.
For no particular reason, I paint dinosaurs over the holiday break.
I could buy decorative trinkets to fill in the bare gaps of a nascent space- and we will but as reminders of places we explored or celebrations of others’ creativity - but I want to have a hand in creating a home. So, with time to sit in this new space we are creating, I pore over decorating inspiration articles; in particular, page after page of DIY tutorials and “upcycles” of gently used and previously loved items. Like little dinosaurs.
Giving in to a creative process - and we’ve talked before around the Campfire that creativity is a broad concept and definition - is a therapeutic experience, well-studied by psychologists. Immersed in the throes of thinking about nothing but the task at hand and the intuitive next step, time bends with this flow and becomes lyrical. Creativity then becomes a space in which time expands but feels like none has passed. In these spaces, armed with paint and a rag tag group of giant lizards, it is unfathomable that Christmas has come and gone yet again, let alone that billions of years have passed since the last dinosaur walked where I now sit.
I feel like a dinosaur, lately.
Post-New Years, but not in any particular act of resolution, I delete most of the social media apps of my phone. Facebook. Instagram. LinkedIn. Twitter. The accounts are all there, but I - an anachronism - am not. Hearing that AI profiles now roamed to provide the dopamine, that our gradual disenchantment and disengagement had already starved the platforms of, was the final straw.1 The experiences were already impersonal; algorithms that deigned to know me, simply because it overhead me muse once about a particular purchase, tried to populate my experience with “helpful” or “interesting” content (while refusing to pay actual creators, like Canadian news agencies, for their content).
The “feed” no longer became a gentle way of catching up on friends and family, but instead a violent, Strasbourg goose force feeding of poor quality trash. It’s one thing to indulge in the candy of pop culture content; another entirely to consume only the stale gas station BBQ peanuts and jelly beans for lunch.
The holidays bring a lovely gift of a quill pen and ink, a handmade book from a Quebec market. I doodle and work on poetry, as if it isn’t a post-pandemic, AI-fueled world hellbent on commodifying creation. Somehow it feels more powerful to completely let go, submit to the temporary nature of this art, committing a precious, finite resource to create something that likely will not last; that our bones have no monetary value attached. Only the value we have for simply being.
I think of ways that I can begin meeting others in the flesh this year, instead of digital avatars, before we, too, become someone’s trinket to fondly remember and paint.
I paint dinosaurs over the holiday break - a few plastic toys I purchased specifically for crafting purposes.
I slick matte black over their hardened, scaly skins and menacing claws. I glide coatings of a holographic oil slick glaze, catching green blue and orange depending on the light and angle.
The irony of a dinosaur - once a giant to roam the Earth, to then be pressed into black gold that fuels the creation of plastic to then again become a much smaller effigy - is all that sticks to me as I dip the brush back into the bottle.
Perhaps one of these was the last dinosaur. I like to think that choosing to celebrate it by creating art with it - from one dinosaur to another - is a fitting tribute.
Even now, my last app - BlueSky (the “new Twitter of old”) - is slowly morphing from creators to cacophony, as the bots and trolls infiltrate.
FWIW, Mastodon seems to be holding out. But it ain't no old Twitter.
Lovely ❤️ and yes, as the noise increases, I find myself retreating in ways I didn’t expect.