Pterosaurs

The naked pictures of ex girlfriends and ex wives, they are somewhere in them, though only the negatives. as a friend said so many years ago, not to long after i shot some of those pictures, the negatives were all i had left of those people and i suppose that was true at the time, but now they are like geological eras buried under layer of sediment, the ecological character displacement of two species of mussels irrelevant after a mass extinction that uplifted the habitat into an eroding hillside. i suppose something fossiiferous is also evident in my relationship with this kindergarten era report card, so lifeshattering at the time, the M for most of the time rather than A for all of the time or N for never, appearing in every single box, both good and bad. as an adult, and a teacher with years rivaling those of my old teacher for the K era, that most cambrian of all of our eras in life, Tomotian even, i now realize that those Ms are probably the result of a time constraint on the teacher's part, perhaps a headache brought on by too many outside voices inside. From the eocene of my life I have pictures of my old house unrehabilitated, from the Cretaceous I have my wedding photos, but like fossil strata, there is a preservation bias here, and many wonderful years of my geologic history passed with barely a memento, and no photographs to speak of. my entire undergraduate college education is a ciper, save for a few strange writings, except that one taxa, the academic, uninteresting to me now, was preserved assiduously.

each of these moving events is a mass extinction of sorts...of possessions and also of the mementos we use to mark occasions. some of us need fewer mementos than others, but we tell a history of ourselves through them the same way crionoid skeletons mark the climate of a now extinct continental shelf, and like geological strata, they are irregularly obliterated at intervals, leaving us to guess at unknown common ancestors for my motivations to do things. some of them were beautiful and others were kind, some of them were lovers and some adversaries, my old analyses of Monet's Houses of Parliment is irrelevant to me, and my explorations into dungeon modules overstudied of late, though ignored till recently, and now i do a brief survey of some of these things that flowered like ancient Rhynia and flew about like pterosaurs, leaving traces of the strange continents of my past.