I know this much is true.

Look, I'm just going to say it: Jurassic Park is the best movie ever.  It was on TV this weekend, and I watched it.  And when it was over, I watched it again.  I ask you, is there a better opening scene than a guy getting eaten by an unseen creature in a crate?  Is anything scarier than velociraptors in the kitchen?  Is there a better line delivered in a British accent to said velociraptor than "Clever girl"?  These are all rhetorical questions because clearly the answer is "no." 

Watching Jurassic Park in the theater in the summer of 1993 was one of the defining moments of my life.  It completely changed the way I saw movies.  If there was a job that consisted of bringing dinosaurs to life, I wanted in.  Think of the power!  That's what fascinated me about movies.  I knew that if I wrote scripts, I could see creatures in my imagination become real.  It was an intoxicating and terrifying idea.  Of course, it could be done badly.  After Jurassic Park finished airing on the SyFy channel, they showed some made-for-TV movie called Triassic Attack about dinosaur skeletons attacking people.  I realize they must have been working within a budget, but dinosaur skeletons?  Weak. 

Now I have a bad habit of writing action scripts and putting the characters in sticky situations just so I can introduce something like a sharkmeleon (that's a shark that's a chameleon) to create a diversion and help them escape.  It blends in with the skyline and then *CHOMP* OMG IT ATE THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AND EVERYONE ON IT. 

Awesome.

To Help the Monkey Cross the River

by Thomas Lux

which he must
cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts,
to help him
I sit with my rifle on a platform
high in a tree, same side of the river
as the hungry monkey. How does this assist
him? When he swims for it
I look first upriver: predators move faster with
the current than against it.
If a crocodile is aimed from upriver to eat the monkey
and an anaconda from downriver burns
with the same ambition, I do
the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey,
croc- and snake-speed, and if, if
it looks as though the anaconda or the croc
will reach the monkey
before he attains the river’s far bank,
I raise my rifle and fire
one, two, three, even four times into the river
just behind the monkey
to hurry him up a little.
Shoot the snake, the crocodile?
They’re just doing their jobs,
but the monkey, the monkey
has little hands like a child’s,
and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.