Digital Life

I haven't thought of a title yet but screw it, I'll just start typing.

I went to see Jurassic Park in IMAX 3D today with my oldest friend. Even after twenty years (by the gods, am I that old?) and at least a hundred viewings, the magic is still there. The life-sized T-rex on the giant screen probably helps. I know this movie backwards and forwards, every line, every sound effect, every tiny inaccuracy some bored nerd picked apart on the internet. And I still get swept into the adventure every time.

You know that movie you had as a kid that you watched every time you were sick or feeling down or just because you were bored? For me, Jurassic Park is that movie. Even today I still watch it when I'm sick. Hey, I'll never feel as bad as the lawyer who got chomped by an angry tyrannosaur. For one thing, I'm not a lawyer.

But even looking beyond the film itself, as wonderful as it is, I can see the ramifications manifesting even today, years down the line. I got really into dinosaurs for one, and that evolved (heh heh) into a love of fantasy when I first saw Dragon Heart, yes it is my namesake here. I also love Godzilla, for the record. You can see a trend here. Dinosaurs didn't evolve into birds, they evolved into dragons and were then hunted to extinction by medieval knights. Assholes. I want a pet T-rex...

That was '95. Then a year later in 1996, something fundamental changed. A novel called The Lost World, written for the upcoming movie sequel to Jurassic Park. To this day I feel so very, truly fortunate that my mom let me buy the book that day. I was 10 years old and had never read an adult novel before. I started reading it in the car on the way home. I devoured all 400 and some-odd pages in no time at all. Dinosaurs and technology and a badass female character (nothing like the movie, for the record), it was all there for my young mind to take in. I was hooked.

I read every book by Michael Crichton I could find. I went back to Jurassic Park, the novel version. And Airframe, which probably played no small part in my present day fascination with all things aerodynamic. And The Andromeda Strain, and Timeline, and...the list goes on. I read and reread and more importantly, I learned about things I never would have been interested in before. Computers, technology, science. The stories may have been fiction, but I still learned a hell of a lot. Some of his works are even true, like Five Patients.

When Michael Crichton died a few years back, I felt like I'd lost my best friend. Seriously. Never met the man, but in a lot of ways he was a hero to me for what he wrote. I actually never read his last few books because if I do that, I'll have nothing new left of his to read and it's like the final acknowledgement that he's gone, to read the final page of his final book and know there will never be another. It's dumb, but that's how I feel. He opened my eyes to concepts and ideas and worlds far beyond anything I'd ever known, and I'm sure that has changed my life in ways I'll never be able to measure.

Watching Jurassic Park today brought a lot of those thoughts back to the surface. I think the saddest part for me, watching the credits roll with "Based on the novel by Michael Crichton", is that I'll never get to tell him, thank you.