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$ .d""b. .d""b. HOE E'ZINE #1034
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$ $ $ $ $ss$ "Fish; And The Near Imminent
$ $ $ $ $ Death of The Fourth One"
$ $ $ $ $ $ by Liberty [3/8/00]
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$ $ "TssT" "TssT"
fish.
nothing good has ever come of a college student having pet fish.
ever. they are a wonderful excuse for procrastination, and they die.
often.
fuck fish, right in the ear.
speaking of which, fish don't even fuck. they lay eggs. what fun.
so, being a college freshman, second semester, always in search of
a better source of procrastination, i buy two fish from meijer at one am
on a saturday night/sunday morning. granted, that may have been my first
mistake. the meijer part.
i bought trippy fish and goth fish, aptly named because they were
a half-red-delta-neon-guppy and a black molly. the guppy's tail was
iridescent and the molly was bigger, brooding, and black. thus the
names. got a little dinky less-than-1/2-gallon bowl and a plastic plant.
this was saturday night.
monday afternoon i go to the real pet store.. jack's aquarium..
get blue rocks for the bottom of the tank, and buy a third fish.. i told
the people i needed an algae eater, and they suggested a cory-catfish
instead of one of those suckerfish because i had a small unfiltered bowl.
i name him poop-eating fish and chunk him in the bowl with the other two.
i don't really like poop-eating fish, he's kind of ugly and mean, but he's
only there to eat trippy and goth's poop so its okay.
tuesday night, while i'm out to dinner with one of my friends,
trippy fish bites it. gives up the ghost. kicks the bucket. out and out
croaks. time of death: less than five days in my room. my very catholic
roommate runs and gets her friend from across the hall because its all
floating and bloated-ish. she's out of the room maybe three minutes, and
when she comes back, they're looking around my desk for the net when
poop-eating fish darts to the top of the bowl and starts head-butting the
very dead trippy fish. by the time they can get the net in there to get
trippy out, he's already missing an eyeball. they give trippy his last
rites and flush him. in the words of my roommate, "It was the most
disturbing thing I have ever seen. Ever. That fish, the ugly catfish
one, is just plain evil. Evil, I tell you, evil."
thursday night, disturbed by recent events, i bought a $15 one
gallon, filtered, heated hexatank, and another half-red-delta-neon-guppy.
his tail is not as iridescent but his body is more cool, and his name
becomes not-so-trippy fish. A little morbid, one might say, but what the
fuck. it's a fish, it doesn't know its name.
so i transport goth and the evil evil poop-eating fish into the new
tank, and add not-so-trippy to the mix.
monday morning, before i go to class, not-so-trippy is kind of
swimming sideways. i rock the tank a little to try and get water flowing
through his gills, but to no avail. time of death: less than four days
in my room. i didn't go all the way down the hallway to flush this wanker,
either. no funeral. just pull out the drain stopper in my sink, plop him
in, run some water, put it back, and go to class. maybe guppies just
can't live in dorm rooms.. maybe it's a chemical imbalance. i could deal
with that. i wasn't as fond of not-so-trippy as i was of trippy, so it
wasn't a big deal.
THAT SAME DAY, around ten or eleven monday night, goth fish is
looking kind of funny, very yellow around his gills, just sitting blah on
the bottom of the tank. i mention it to my roommate, we're both peering
down at him, and i kind of bump the tank to see if he'll move, and he
slowly floats to the top. "cuhrrist!" i yell, forgetting that it bugs
her when i say that. "everything DIES!"
so we fish (hehe...fish.. i kill me) him out and i stick him in a
cup and take him down to the bathroom at the end of the hall and flush
him and stand around down there a few minutes so she'll think i'm
actually giving him a funeral or whathaveyou.
it is now the following monday, and that bastard poop-eating fish
keeps giving me evil looks and whispering things and lurking around and
generally being evil and not dying.
he's not dead! he's the only one i really didn't care about one
way or the other. i just bought the fucker so he would eat the *real*
fish's poop and the algae and keep the tank clean for THEM.
poop-eating fish has become the bane of my existence. he has
stolen my will to live and i fucking want it back.
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[ (c) HOE E'ZINE -- http://www.hoe.nu HOE #1034, BY LIBERTY - 3/8/00 ]