Over the years, I have begrudgingly come to accept that there are some kinds of information that my head is simply not shaped to hold. Conversations I had ten years ago, these I could produce transcripts of from memory. “Mork & Mindy” episodes I saw when I was four: would you prefer quoted dialogue or plot summaries? Long after my brain is suspended in embalming fluid, a corner of it will still be whispering, “Hotbot.com was powered by Inktomi and shared search results with Lycos.com, while AOL/Netscape was powered by the Open Directory Project, while over at MSN….” I could take a cordless drill to my temple, and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference.

But dammit, I cannot make myself think about the Indians.

I have been reading Beyond the Frontier: A History of St. Louis to 1821. I have been reading it for, let’s say, five months. I am on roughly page 40.

Though this frustrates me enough to put the book in my mouth and bite down on it, I know that it and its author are entirely blameless in this matter. I was so excited to read this mason’s brick of a volume that I brought it with me on my honeymoon, and I gamboled merrily through the first chapter, drinking in a sea of information that was new to me despite my lifelong residence in the area. (”Before the Europeans,” page 3 said to me, “St. Louis had cavemen!” “Oh, good sir,” I said to page 3, “it still does.”)

I was having a wonderful time and then, just like always, along came the Native Americans. They ruined the Revolutionary War books, and now they’ve come for St. Louis history, riding over the hills of my brain in a giant, indistinct stampede of dull, plodding hooves, shrieking things I can’t make myself care about, shooting arrow after arrow of boredom into my book.

The Illini and the Missouri and the Plains and the Fox and the Sioux and the Osage, always the warlike Osage, bastards of the West, the only tribe with any trait memorable enough to stay in there after my eyes have left the words. Did the Illini hate the Fox? Was it the Plains who hated the Illini? Which ones were at Peoria?

Brilliant authors. Gifted educators. Legions of people have attempted to get this information within the confines of my skull. It’s not going in. Confined to a small pen, receiving life-giving food only in exchange for accurate Indian trivia, I would die in three days. With my last breath, I would be rasping, “…Pueblo? I don’t know. Chippewa?” And that’s if they let me take the book into the pen with me.

I think that’s one of my favorite things about dinosaurs. Paleontologists are constantly discovering fascinating new things about prehistoric creatures, and more often than not those things contradict all the other things you were told about them six months earlier. Everything you learn about dinosaurs is probably going to turn out to be wrong, so as the reader you are almost rewarded for being unable to retain the information. The science of 2005 suggests that the raptor had magnificent purple feathers on its knees like some kind of reptilian drag queen. By the time I have kids, conventional wisdom will hold that their hearts were made of wax and pumped static electricity to power the pinwheels on their tails.