When I was forty-four, I discovered the secret of life. Guess what it was- dinosaurs. Just think about it. Some derided my discovery as a mid-life crisis, but truly my mind had never felt clearer. Working at a year-round Christmas Emporium will mess with your mind. Just think about it- It’s high summer. The endless acres of comically large-headed Saint Nicks and gigantic globes stand empty and decrepit. But still you’re working there. You have that little nametag on that says ‘Joe’ or ‘Sue’ or ‘Adramelech, Sun Deity’ or something like that. The only people you get in those dead ages are fanatics always looking for a new string of lights for their year-round Winter Wonderland. But that is only half of the madness. When it gets to wintertime, the whole world goes insane again. Too many people. And they all get a little crazy. I once saw an old lady pulling another old lady’s hair. Then they got into a pepper-spray fight which somehow ended with a fire in the fake tree section. Those things burned like drywood and smelled like death. So, you can see why I had to get out. In fact, I high-tailed it out of there as fast as I could. I quit and moved out of town. Everyone called me the Snow Globe Man. I couldn’t stand it anymore. So that’s why I started searching. For what, I didn’t know at the time. But now I do. It’s dinosaurs. These days I while away my savings buying Chinese food at the Lucky Boar and pigging out as I skirt about town on my segue. And I think. About dinosaurs. Here’s why. Some One Trillion Billion Years or so (plus or minus an eon) the dinosaurs existed on this earth. They co-existed fine for the most part except when they got into a TOTALLY WICKED DINO-BATTLE. And that got me to thinking, all those years ago: What if we were super cool two-story beasts capable of chewing steel and spitting out dynamite? Well, I figure we’d fight a lot. And then I came to my conclusion: If we were so busy fighting and generally being huge and having deadly talons, we wouldn’t bother with creating huge Christmas Emporiums. We wouldn’t have old ladies beating each other over the brow for the last Alvin And The Chipmunks ornament. We would just be fighting each other. That’s when I realized that all humans should learn a lesson from the dinosaurs. I think we should just stop while we’re ahead. Imagine, no crazy supermarkets with people killing each other and going mad, just normal jungles and stuff (with people still killing each other, but we’d be dinosaurs so it’s cool). So I concocted a scheme. I was going to invent a serum that turned everyone into dinosaurs. After years of work, I finally made the potion. I dumped it into our town’s water supply. Sadly, it didn’t work too well. Instead of becoming two-story tall dinosaurs, we all became two-story tall Roast Beef Sandwiches. I wasn’t sure how that happened, but we began to try to eat each other. We didn’t have mouths but we could tell that we were each delicious. Well, eventually the paramedics arrived to cure this new epidemic, ‘Roastbeefitis’, and the military soon discovered the applications of this disease. Soon, every other nation in the world but the Grand Ol’ U S of A was Roast Beef Sandwiches. Just sitting out there baking in the sun. Our world’s food and population crises were fixed. For eternity. If you weren’t a vegetarian, that is. I think they all died off a couple years ago, actually, when we stopped growing vegetables because we all agreed they tasted bad. So here I am, the Lucky Boar serving a full menu of Roast-Beef-ified goats, chickens, and perhaps the occasional dog. And still today I think about how great it would have been, to forget about this silly Roast Beef world and become dinosaurs and just beat each other up. No Emporiums, no two-story sandwiches lying around, just dinosaurs.