Jurassic 2016

At the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1 2016, I was cast into a time vortex that spiraled me back into time to the Jurassic Period. So next time you say 2016 was bad, let me tell you it’s not that bad. Yes it does suck that Donald Trump is in charge of the country, but you know who is in charge of the Jurassic? The f*****g Tyrannosaurus Rex. Perhaps you’ve heard of him from the famous hit TV series “Barney the Dinosaur” or from the Universal Studios “Jurassic Park” ride.

I’m not entirely sure how it happened, but right as the ball dropped and I went in for my New Year’s Eve kiss, I surged through time and space in an inter-dimensional rift that spat me out sometime in the Jurassic Period in North America. My childhood knowledge of dinosaurs allowed me to discern the approximate age, as a pack of Velociraptors chased me through the underbrush and bit my left ring finger and pinkie finger off. Contrary to popular belief, Velociraptors are much smaller than in Jurassic Park, which I took note of when the small dinosaur snapped his razor sharp teeth around my two fingers severing them completely. As the small beast began devouring my digits, I jumped into a river where I swam to safety. So if you tell me it was “super crazy” how many celebrities died this past year, I’ll tell you how super crazy the oxygen levels were in this time period leading to dragonflies the size of seagulls, and beetles the size of golden retrievers.

Many of my friends back in 2016 had their “like worst year ever,” as they spent so much time posting on Facebook about Hillary Clinton and tagging their friends in memes. But I didn’t enjoy the luxuries of modern technology and an expanding social network, as I had to sneak into a Pteranodon nest and smash its eggs for any semblance of fast food. Any time I did go hunting for eggs, I ran the risk of a flying monster scooping me up and tossing me over a cliff a half-mile in the air. Thankfully nothing like that ever happened.

Oh, wait, yes it did, every single f*****g meal. You do not know how many times I had to stab a dinosaur in the gut with a shiv fashioned out of a Deinonychus tibia. Imagine every meal you ever ate you also probably fell 16 stories into either dinosaur infested waters or dinosaur infested trees, so I apologize for not being sympathetic that a gorilla in Cincinnati died. You know if that kid fell into a cage with a Deinonychus, he would have been eaten alive.

And sure my year was not all that bad; I was super independent and worked a lot. Partially because no humans would come into existence for another 140 million years, and if I didn’t work to survive, I would have been killed by pretty much everything that was alive at the time. However, I know now how to make a fire from extinct plants and to know which of those plants I can eat. (I won’t even go into the notion of prehistoric poisonous plants and the prehistoric gastrointestinal issues that follow eating such plants, I’ll just let you know that it’s super stressful using the bathroom when there are dinosaurs that weighed 198-thousand pounds who simply wouldn’t notice if they pulverized you by accident). I also am capable of downing a Ankylosaurus in less than 45 minutes, a world record for humans, which I think is impressive or at least more impressive than any Candy Crush score you got in the line to Starbucks. So yes, I did have some good times in the Jurassic, but most of them were shadowed by the looming fact that actual DINOSAURS surrounded me at any given moment.

Now, many people have never had to fend off a Triceratops in heat with a sharpened stick and a burning branch, so they don’t know the hardships of the Jurassic. However, it does get old to hear about how the world “will totally end” when Donald Trump is president, when I quite literally saw the meteor that ended all life on Earth crash down in the Gulf of Mexico. Once the massive heat wave and debris hurtled towards my cave dwelling at the end of the year, the time vortex sucked me back up and placed me at Jan. 1, 2017. I’ve read through the “hilarious memes” of 2016 and went through the SNL presidential debates, but nothing really intrigues me after I saw an Allosaurus devour an entire nest of Stegosaurus babies.

Next time you feel like complaining about the woes of 2016, let me be the first to tell you it could have been WAY worse.

Nick Younger is a Trinity senior. His column, “Medical Professionals Hate Him!” runs on alternate Fridays.