Bones

Things Bones do: shatter splinter crack break bruise grow cancer hollow out with calcium deficiency mold themselves over foreign objects glow in the dark laugh like a mindless maniac in cartoons turn into rock curve like bonsai pit and chip like sandstone get tired dissolve in acid crumble quiver shake shiver

Bone:

n.

1.

a. The dense, semirigid, porous, calcified connective tissue forming the major portion of the skeleton of most vertebrates. It consists of a dense organic matrix and an inorganic, mineral component. When buried underneath a house, especially in the case of murder, will rattle and shake and sometimes whisper strange things.

b. Any of numerous anatomically distinct structures making up the skeleton of a vertebrate animal. There are more than 200 different bones in the human body. There are no bones in a squid.

c. A piece of bone. Will choke you someday, and you'll lay there gasping and dying in the middle of the restaurant while everyone around you freaks out and watching their inept panicked faces, you will realize in a hard moment that you care nothing for any of them, not even as humans, the only thing you care about is yourself and not dying right now and none of these fuckers are qualified to help you at all.

2. bones

a. The skeleton. Dead.

b. The body. Dead.

c. Mortal remains. Dead.

3. An animal structure or material, such as ivory, resembling bone. Poached and cut and sawed off.

4. Something made of bone or of material resembling bone, especially:

a. A piece of whalebone or similar material used as a corset stay.

b. bones Informal Dice. Roll those bones, shake those stays, snake eyes.

5. bones The fundamental plan or design, as of the plot of a book, or the broken remains of a building, or the arches of a mine.

6.

a. bones Flat clappers made of bone or wood originally used by the end man in a minstrel show.

b. Bones (used with a sing. verb) The end man in a minstrel show. Because that was a thing once that everyone knew.

tr.v. boned, bon·ing, bones

1. To remove the bones from. As fast as you, tearing the animal carcass apart in smooth practiced butchery.

2. To stiffen (a piece of clothing) with stays, as of whalebone. He peeled the bones from her torso like the skin of a peach, each panel tearing off in slow careful rags.

Phrasal Verb:

bone up

Informal To study intensely, usually at the last minute: boned up for the final exam. To drink so much coffee you have more fear that your heart will explode than of whatever it is you are studying for.

Idioms:

bone of contention

The subject of a dispute.

bone to pick

Grounds for a complaint or dispute.

To Bone: to fuck

When they came to eat you, it was not because they were hungry and you looked the tastiest. It was because they were mindless vicious murderous beasts intent on tasting the blood of every living thing that skittled and scuttled across their path.

Have you ever actually touched or held a reptile egg? They are the most fucked up alien things ever. Rubbery and artificial looking and soft. They make no sense in this world when compared to the nice hard sensible bird egg. The point at which a reptile looks most prehistoric is in the egg, it is a snapshot of what the end of world domination really looks like. The actual fall of a life form, millenia, not just piddly centuries, something that actual might matter in the universe even in footnote fashion.

What is, I think, most intriguing to little kids about dinosaurs is the complexity of them. For instance, they have huge scary wonderful unpronounceable names. They are the size of buildings. They have brains in other parts of their bodies. There are two types of monsters - animal based and human based. Dinosaurs are the ultimate animal based monsters, which makes them inherently more sympathetic. Anything large and dumb, even the villainous, T rex, is instantly fantastic for it's pet potential. It's funny how we try to turn these crazy dangerous monsters into happy fuzzy things for children, because it's supposed to encourage them to get into science, which is of course the best thing for any child to be into. But I was always way more interested in the really scary dinosaurs. I think everyone naturally is. So I don't understand why there aren't more children's shows about dinosaur death matches. Children respond to bloodshed and natural order. And then of course, there's Shark Week.

Bones though. I don't have the same emotional reaction to human bones that I do dinosaur bones. Dinosaur bones fill me with a sense of really huge history and time and place and looking at their giant joints makes me feel the tendons in my elbows and knees so clearly, the movement of my neck too, staring at the size and shape of their elongated vertebrae. Human bones, even the earliest ones, give me nothing. I feel no connection to them. They are like toys. The frozen ash shadow people of Pompeii are statues to me, there is no proper communication of pain, no empathy. That tragic experience of human frailty that people exclaim over? Nope, I am a cold blooded girl. I understand the hunger and instinct in the shape of the dinosaurs better.

The relics of human development that affect me are the creations of it, the cave paintings and the rough tools. The closest I ever got to the same feeling from humans was when I went to the Bodies exhibit, the one where that guy filled cadavers with plastic resin? And you could see all the strings of the muscles and the impossibly delicate filigree of veins and arteries. After all, that was sort of the perfect combination of human remains and human creation. We are such morbid fucking things.

Its hard to not look at things like this as an example of Nature trying and failing, as if we are a superior species, an improvement. It's the Mammal's Bias. Maybe we are. Or maybe we are just another form of life, rising up and falling as they do all the time. In five hundred thousand years our entire world order will be different - the plants, the skies, the continents and ocean. Notice how science fiction sort of tops out at a certain length of time into the future? You don't have a lot of scifi that takes place millions of years from now, because jesus, who can even start to think of that? That's the sort of shit that will drive you crazy for sure. That's like looking into a black hole. We won't even be around. What the fuck will genes have done by then? It reminds me of that awful song they used to play on the oldies station, before the oldies became the eighties, that "In the year 2525" song. I hate that song, it makes me so uncomfortable.

The future is what dinosaurs do to me. They make it exist. They make me have to keep my eyes open to the void.