s$ $$ .d""b. .d""b. HOE E'ZINE #1034 [-- $$""b. $$ $$ $$ $$ -- ------------------------------------------- --] $$ $$ $$ $$ $$ss$$ "Fish; And The Near Imminent $$ $$ $$ $$ $$ Death of The Fourth One" $$ $$ $$ $$ $$ $$ by Liberty [3/8/00] [-- $$ $$ $$ $$ $$ $$ -- ------------------------------------------- --] $$ $$ "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. [-------------------------------------------------------------------------] [ (c) HOE E'ZINE -- http://www.hoe.nu HOE #1034, BY LIBERTY - 3/8/00 ]