Last year for my birthday, Tara surprised me with a gift certificate for a fish tank. We went out and picked a big one so it would be easy to maintain, figured it would be roomy and nothing to worry about. We got a batch of small community fish so we wouldn’t have to deal with any fish needs, but this all turned out to be a small world with big drama. Every now and then we would go out an pick up a new one because we had lots of room. One of the first ones we got was a fish whose model name was some kind of shark (only because it resembled one, not a real shark.) He looked pretty happy at the fish store so we bought him and dumped him into the tank. He sank to the bottom and laid there like he was dead, every now and then getting up to move around a little. Then, over the next few days he laid there for so long that we were sure he was dead and it was time to flush him. I grabbed the net, went to scoop him up and he spring back to life and went ballistic, shooting all over the tank running into the glass at each end and then he lodged himself into a plant and stayed there. We clearly bought a fish with serious mental issues, but that’s cool; he can hang out by himself in the plant if he chooses, or he can lay on the bottom, or when he’s feeling really crazy, he’ll stand upright on his tail for 30 minutes at a time.

We also picked up some kind of small catfish and because he was the coolest fish ever, he was and will be the only fish in this tank to get a name. He is The Catatafish because he resembled the one that Lemmiwinks ran into in Mr. Slave’s ass. Here’s a shot of him and our “shark” for a split second where the shark was acting normal. Or, you can see him with the shark in the shark’s more likely mentally unstable state. So the Catatafish is cool, right? He actually swims around like a shark, goes really fast and stirs up the water, and gives you a show. He grew at a really fast pace, and before we knew it, he had gone from about 3″ to about 8″. We also had a school of 10 small fish that gradually got smaller and smaller until there were two left and we realized that someone was consuming them, obviously the fish that was getting really fat. Along the way one of those ten committed suicide and threw himself out of the tank when I left it open and he eventually died after he jumped the equivalent of 100 stories below after he bounced around on the carpet for a little bit. There’s been a lot of drama in the tank – cannibalism, births, more cannibalism, deaths, suicide attempts, successful suicides, the tank overflowing all over the kitchen floor, etc.

We ended up taking the Catatafish back to the fish store before anyone else got eaten. The shark still does his usual, as you can see him standing here with his favorite plant. Every few days he snaps out of it and shoots around the tank and usually ends up getting a small cut on his nose where he runs into whatever gets in his path. That’s the life in our fish tank.