The Museum of Jurassic Technology

“What is it called again?” she asked. She was driving, we were getting off the highway and into Culver City.

”The Museum of Jurassic Technology,” I said.

”Huh. So does it have dinosaurs and stuff?” Culver City was all around us. I had imagined it to be something out of the wild west, but it looked exactly like any other place around LA.

”No, not really. I read a book about it. Well, I almost read it. It was boring as hell. The book. I never finished,” I remembered the rainy afternoon in Maine when nothing was interesting on the Internet so I picked up a moldy paperback from the shelf at Bryan’s house. It was an old house that my friend inherited from his grandfather. The book was not old, only everything in the house became moldy quickly. “But the museum sounded interesting. It’s got stuff in there that was never real, never existed.”

She nodded, doing a little click with her tongue at the same time. She did not seem that interested. She was always a practical woman, never had time for nonsense. But she was also my only ride here. I had come all the way to the West Coast to see the museum.

She parked the car in the lot of some restaurant or something, I do not remember, and we walked from there. The museum was right at the bus stop in Venice Boulevard. A small green building with a fancy old-timey sign and a mock-fountain. The sign on the door said it was free for local residents and that this included people waiting at the bus stop too.

Unfortunately, it was only open on Thursdays, and it was a Monday.

”Well, that’s that,” she said.

”Yeah, I gotta catch my flight to New York tomorrow,” I said, “So I guess I won’t be seeing what’s inside after all."

"Don’t worry,” she said, “You’ll always have the memory of something that could have been.”

Posted by: Paweł Kowaluk