We're soon to be dominated by fish
I just got back from taking a five-day vacation at the beach and there were two things that occurred to me while I was there:
1. Vacation totally rules and that we should honestly never have to suffer through the indignity of non-vacation time ever. I don’t say this in a short-sighted, oblivious-of-that-annoying-oh-life-must-go-on axiom; I say it as a fact, fully cognizant that it would mean we’d never get anything done and that we’d all just bliss out drinking piña coladas and other drinks with umbrellas and shit in them 24/7 and reading novels and picking sand out of our cracks. I mean honestly, who the hell cares? So some reports wouldn’t get filed. And so we wouldn’t earn any money. We’d just live on the beach and run out of money and turn into bums and we’d never shower and we’d stink and we’d walk into Bloomingdales (probably attracted by the shiny things) and these fancy people would pass out from our body odor and then we’d fall asleep on the perfume table and that would even out the smell, and the only real problem would be that we’d owe like ten grand for spilled and broken perfumes but you could never sue us because we wouldn’t have any concept of money and where the fuck are you going to send the court papers? To the beach? That’s retarded. There’s no mail on the beach.
2. We’re destroying the world. Not by polluting it or raping it, but by making fish super-intelligent.
I thought about the latter when I was sitting in this low little beach chair under a giant umbrella reading House of Leaves again and this snake swims up onto the sand with a fish in its mouth. The snake parks himself and proceeds to try and work this small catfish down his throat.
I’m watching this, fascinated. I mean, not because a snake just swam up on the beach and not just because a snake manages to tread water without any arms or legs AND keep his head above water AND look cool doing it, but because he’s pretty much got zero shame about doing all of this right in front of me and my mom and stepdad and brother and sister.
It’d be like if you’re in the otherwise-empty food court of a mall and some woman walked right up to you, sat down across from you, and started to breastfeed a baby. Or like if a you were in a lawyer’s office and some fat guy in a torn Def Leppard T-shirt with a wallet chain sat on your lap and ate a hoagie. Or like this time that my dad and I were in an airport laughing about this sound file he had on his computer that said, “Can you ever see a woman eating a banana and NOT think about a blowjob?” when this old lady sits down next to us, eats a banana, and promptly leaves. True story.
But there was more on top of the snake’s total lack of social decorum. While everyone is marveling over this snake’s ability to eat this fish whole, I’m marveling at this fish’s ability to get caught. In the water, where fish are supposed to be at home. By a fucking snake.
“So how does a snake catch a fish, anyway?” I asked aloud.
“They’re fast,” said my stepfather.
“But not that fast. I mean, we watched him swim in. And fish are a lot faster.” I was thinking of my earlier experiment trying to catch minnows for my son. Every step we took, the fish scattered. After several hours, we had caught four minnows, two of which died instantly. We probably caught those two because they were having tiny heart attacks, and we caught the other two because they wandered into these tiny little nets we were using.
The ones we caught were old, dying, or stupid, in other words.
So how did a snake catch a catfish? Probably stopped to ask the snake for directions. Or maybe the snake told him he was the winner of an internet lottery. The smart fish were all, “Hey, Jimmy, you don’t want to dick around with that black thing over there.” But he was all, “Pro wrestling is real,” and then it was over while the remaining fish went back home to watch Masterpiece Theater and drink port.
Same thing goes when a fish is caught by a shiny lure on the end of a fishing line. It’s the stupid fish that get it. All this time, we think we’ve been building better fishing equipment, but we’re just catching more and more of the stupid fish. The ones who would get caught if you tossed a snare trap in the water and baited it with a Cheeto.
We’re helping fish evolve. And it’s not going to be pretty. Because as we catch more and more of the stupid fish and remove them from the gene pool, this situation is only going to get worse.
Each time some stupid fish get eaten or caught, the smart ones swim home and lay a cluster of eggs and pass on smart genes, and then those fish go out and the dumb ones get eaten and so it repeats, over and over again, each generation getting smarter and smarter and smarter until they’re quoting Wordsworth and building flying supermarines to explore the air world at night and creating weird water probes with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s face in it like in that movie The Abyss and I’M FUCKING TELLING YOU WE’VE GOT A PROBLEM and there’s an underworld lair of superfish down there just waiting to attack. Possible targets? I’m thinking Arthur Treacher’s or Long John Silver’s.
You just think about that for a moment. Think about it the next time you go in the water, and decide if you want fish with giant fish brains that pulsate with genius fish thoughts severing your feet with their superfish fishrays.
Think about that the next time you go fishing, if you assume it’s all innocent. Think about how you’re leading this world to a kind of Planet of the Fish complete with fish armies and a fish Dr. Zaius and the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand while Young Charleton Heston is all like, “YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP!”
Think about that, you monster. If you can.
Comments
4 Comments on We're soon to be dominated by fish
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mr-crash on
Wed, 8th Jul 2009 9:06 pm
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Johnny B. Truant on
Thu, 9th Jul 2009 11:10 am
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Jim w on
Fri, 10th Jul 2009 7:51 am
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BlueSteel on
Fri, 10th Jul 2009 9:52 am
Dude, House of Leaves is an epic book.
Also, for anyone else i’d never mention it but I know how you are a bit of a stickler for grammar and all that sort of junk (before reading here I never knew “snuck” wasn’t a word). So the last line should probably read “Think” instead of “Hink”.
Unless, of course, you want us to really hink about something. Which is (apparently) “A reaping hook”. I have to say, that does sound pretty cool. And probably a hell of a lot more monster like.
I hink you’re hinking too deeply about all of this.
Trust me, fish will take over the world. They can breathe underwater for god’s sake, it’s witchcraft. I have tropical fish, you can tell they’re plotting things, the sneaky gits. Once i left the lid off and the orange one (that’s the species name) jumped out. It was trying to attack me.
If only someone would invent a perfume or cologne that smelled like The Beach. Hmmmm….
Great video of the snake. What park of Lake Erie did you stay?
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