Sinclair's petro-animism

Sincair oil is a Salt Lake City-based corporation; they’re siamese twins with Little America. fueling your journey by day and putting you up for the night. in my county there are 7 Sinclair filling stations, which is like 3,500 people to every green apatosaurus. of course there are other filling stations too but this is where I buy my gas and where my car passed safety inspection yesterday. it’s on the corner of what was, until earlier this year, the only stoplight in the whole county, one block from where I live.

photo taken today actually; several hundred sheep ran the red light a few times. with 3 or 4 Peruvian guys riding herd.

of all the oil company mascots around, Sinclair’s dinosaur is by far the boldest illustration of our utilitarian relationship with the primal world. not Chevron, with his gendered cars, alert with eyes. not Exxon’s tiger, grarrr! Shell Oil’s stylized scallop does approach the audacity of Sinclair’s animism.*

But I gotta say that Sinclair is probably my favorite place to get screwed at the pump. I mean, if only the butcher were so candid about “who killed the pork chops?” and about what it’s all about. I mean what this wild mystifying world of stratified wonders means to us: about $60/barrel. when we start scratching around for the stuff in tar sands and shale, that’s when we know it’s time to begin cloning more apatosaurus and bulldozing them deep into mass graves.

*for more on whether oil really comes from dinosaurs, plankton, shells or what, check out Cecil Adams’ the Straight Dope.