Soul-disturbed in the pursuit & fulfillment of purpose

I’m by no means a hard core environmentalist, PETA enthusiast, or diehard tree-hugger. They all have their place and are important, but all things in balance. Cruelty to animals is horrendous, but I have no problem eating filet mignon, gutting a fish, or steaming lobsters. And I’m especially thankful for those who slaughter livestock, ’cause it still seems pretty brutal even when done “humanely”. Not something I’d want to stand around watching or partaking in every day. But someone has to. I reduce the amount of meat I eat, for health’s sake, but not to decrease the slaughtering of animals.

My wife is in school currently, check her out (http://www.knowgutsnoglory.com). She, we, want kids, but not while she’s in school. I kept joking with her about getting her some goldfish to hold her over until we could start having kids, her reply a little embittered usually. A couple months ago, I came home and set up a large glass container with 2 goldfish on her desk. They were pleasant to watch frolicking about clumsily with their barreled bodies. My wife came home to this new ornamentation gracing the corner of her desk and laughed with a sneer peeking through the right corner of her mouth. She hugged me and we playfully bantered over the silliness of it all. The next day, the goldfish had dirtied the water to the point they had become significantly lethargic. I thought, what the hell, how can this already be that dirty.

All my memories of goldfish were of my friend’s familie’s goldfish from high school. They had this goldfish that lived in a little bottle of water next to their kitchen sink. A little bottle of water for a big hardy goldfish. It was massive compared to its living space. This thing lived forever like that. I always thought they changed the water once a week or every couple of weeks. My recall must be off.

After some Googling, I discovered goldfish, while hardy, are some of the most prolific producers of toxins, like ammonia. So much so that high grade filters and large enclosures are recommended. I got the worst fish for our setup, a large glass container with no filter. SOB!, I thought this was going to be a near maintenance-less pet. That was the idea. Get a hardy fish that needs little care taking, like hermit crabs or cacti. I had the opposite. Well frickin’chicken, I thought. What do I do now? I thought for several moments to see if I knew of anyone that would take them. Nope, no one. We determined I would go out the next day and get a real tank with filter and all. This was becoming a huge undertaking. The next day, the water was again super cloudy. I went to the store, got a little tank with filter and brought it home. The big goldfish had died! The little one was barely moving. Damit! They were fine right before I left! I quickly filled a bowl with water about the same temperature and put them both in, hoping to still revive the large one. I swirled the water to force the little one to swim and take in fresh oxygenated H20. I took the large goldfish in between my index finger and thumb gently holding him upright, his mouth toward the current of the water. Too late. The forced fresh water over his gills wasn’t enough to resuscitate him. He was a goner. I did everything short of CPR, and it crossed my mind, but the thought of squeezing too hard and feeling little goldfish ribs crack in between my fingers was too much. Ugh, gross. Made me think of the time I stepped on a cricket with my bare foot after descending to my dark basement cement floor, eeeegh.

So now we had this one goldfish in a tank, the survivor of a horrendous toxic epidemic. Damit, now I had to go get more fish. Can’t just have one lonely goldfish in a tank. We picked up a snail, several guppies, and several neons. All hardy fish that we thought would do well with our sole survivor. We introduced them and all was well… until the next day. The tank was all cloudy and smelled like open ass. My frustration was building. How could such an elementary endeavor have turned so massive and complex? What started as, just a goldfish, turned into the Hadron Collider! How dam hard could it be to keep some fish?! I could have discovered and scientifically confirmed and re-confirmed the frickin’ Higgs particle, and then unsolved all its mysteries by now. Back to Google. A quick search indicated we had “new tank syndrome”, seriously? New tank syndrome? ARGH! Yup, I could have figured out time travel by now, but how to keep some “hardy” fish alive in a square of water eluded me. Went back to the store and got some drops to neutralize the chlorine in the tap water and another dropper with “good” bacteria to help balance the bad bacteria that caused “new tank syndrome”. Apparently a common rookie fish keeper mistake, not letting the tank run for a week before populating it. Oh yeah, and apparently a rookie fish keeping mistake not getting the marine biology doctorate online through the University of Phoenix too. After adding these drops, the tank cleared up in about a day. VICTORY!!! F’n YEAH!!! Take that Bitch!!! AHHHHHRRRR!!! FEEL the burn you bastards!!! The burn of my prevail!

As our serene little tank of fish happily cohabited, we added a sucker fish to keep the sides clearer. We were passing the stage of rookie fish owners now so adding a new fish was no big deal. It went off without a hitch. The sucker settled in and got to cleaning. More time passed , a week or so, and we had noticed the all the fish seeed to hate the goldfish. It wasn’t hard to see why. It was big, clumsy, and looked stupid. If I were a guppy, I’d think the goldfish were some mutant reject too and torture it. The guppies would mercilessly chase the big oaf around the tank nipping at his fins. All day this went on and the goldfish stumbled around running from them like a drunk. Didn’t this big ass monstrosity realize it was like 4 times larger than anything else in the tank? It easily could have bullied every other fish around and established its place at the top. King of the tank. Ruler of the empire. But alas, it was just dumb and didn’t know any better. I tried conditioning the guppies by tapping on the tank every time they got near the goldfish, but Pavlov’s had nothing in common with the guppy apparently. They went right back to bugging the crap out of the goldfish as soon as I stopped. So the abuse went on for a while. There wasn’t much that could be done. He’d just have to live stupid and scared. Hell of a way to be.

About another week passed, and we began to notice spots on a couple fish, then all the fish, except the snail. Come on not something else, I thought. Google. A quick search gave us our answer. The spots looked pretty comparable to the web images of a disease called Ick. I’d heard of Ick before and new this was not good. Our whole tank was infected so we had to attempt something. That night I went out and got some Ick medicine, which came as fluid in a little bottle with a dropper. We followed the directions and put it in the water. The fish had an immediate reaction, bolting around the tank and glancing, a term for rubbing on the bottom of the tank or against stuff in it (we were past rookie stage so knew some fish lingo). It was rather horrible to watch. They were clearly in a great deal of discomfort, but we had to. The only other method was getting a heater and heating the water up for a week or something, but the whole fish endeavor had already gone too far and I didn’t want to keep buying more crap for this. Knowing what I know now though, I should have bought the heater and used this method.

After a couple days of Ick treatment, they were no getting better. Their fins were tattered and full of perforations. Their poor little bodies were full of painful looking sores and spots. We both felt horrible for them. The snail continued to scurry around like nothing was going on though, completely unscathed. I couldn’t watch them in that state any longer and resolved to euthanize them. Oh, and the sucker fish had died and was being eaten by the other fish. That was a deciding factor too.

My wife suggested flushing them, but I strongly refused this method. It seemed like perhaps the worst way to die. Think about it. Your sore spotted body and torn tattered fins, already sensitive from the burning medicine and eating parasites, is then dumped from great heights slapping the surface of a cold bowl of chlorinated water. A castle mote of despair and rotting death. Then, after the sting of the fall and slap of the water, a gagging feeling as this cold chemical filled water starts to make you gasp for each breath. All of the sudden, there is this current of a thousand whirlpools pushing against your sensitive, weak, battered body. It’s agony to try to expend any energy or to move at this point, but all you know is your nature tells you to swim against it, and with all your might. You flex and flutter as your skin, muscles, and fins shoot with pain. Harder and harder you swim but your are sucked down a dark hole against all your strength. Your last mustered ounce of wherewithal is gone and all you can do is violently crash down this dark hole of death, straight to fish hell. But it’s still not over. You’re still conscious! And it’s about to actually get bad now. This dark mired hole to hell doesn’t end in a ceasing of your awareness of alertness, oh no. You are keenly aware of everything going on around you. As you whirl out of control down this pipe, your poor little sensitive sore ridden body is scrapping like a scrubbing pad along the most vile and filthy surfaces known to man and fish-kind. Your sores are being ripped open and scrapped with pipes that harbor sharp rusty edges, human and other waste, bacteria, parasites, and all manner of unspeakable things. Your skin tears from your bones like a band-aide from a hairy arm. Your poor little sensitive fish eyes without their eyelids are also scrapping and tearing from your sockets, or sustaining irreparable damage agains the pipes rough and sorted surface. All is lost. But it still not frickin’ over! Fish hell is a long and winding road of wrath, no mercy here. Better to have been eaten by your mother shortly after birth while still a fishling. After the long almost endless plummet downward against eviscerating walls of sharp coral like protrusions, you are now immersed in a chilling cold acid bath full of murky debris filled muck. If you’re lucky, you fall on top of something floating above the surface of the muck and die of suffocation, since you are way to weak to fling and wriggle yourself off. The hell stops for those few lucky fish. For the many others, they fall into the devils sputum. It burns your sores even more, eating into you body cavity. But it does so with the cold piercing point of an ice sickle. Boring into your excruciating wounds. Pain singles shoot to your brain from all over your fish body. Its so dam cold. I can hardly breath. My gills are clogged with debris but I’m too weak to move or try to clear them. You lay in the filth and very slowly die in agonizing and excruciating pain, your body fit for vaulters but still alive until the very bitter end. Your last dying thought, AHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Yeah, there was no way I was flushing our fish down the toilet. The devil wasn’t having our fish that day. Back Satan! Google. After some searching, I learned the best and most humane way to euthanize fish was to wade them into a deep paralytic sleep educed with a very tiny amount of clove oil. I went to a health food and product store down the street, conveniently, and bought a small bottle. We said our last parting words to our poor fish and gently put them one by one into a smaller bowl of water that had been treated with several drops of clove oil. The fish swam around normal at first. But after about a minute, they were clearly becoming unconscious. They slowly and peacefully drifted to a still and calm position at the bottom of the bowl. I think they were all high as they did so too, which I believe is in part what the clove oil does, like when you go under for surgery and feel all happy and high right before. So our happy high fish drifted off into never never land. After they were all settled at the bottom and without movement, I added a bunch more clove oil drops to make sure they were out for good. We went to dinner and left them all evening. When we returned, they were changing colors and clearly dead. So at this point, at the end of a long sad journey, we flushed their dead little fish carcasses down the toilet.

I was so relieved they went so peacefully and apparently painlessly. It was like the first moment of relief any of them had had since becoming diseased. At last they could breath easily and drift into a daze of numbing serenity. Off for a good nap with no worries ahead finally.

But, the snail was still alive and fine! LOL! It was totally healthy. What do we do now? Well, I really wanted to just give up and call this whole fish thing done. But we were stuck with this snail. Can’t have a whole tank with just one lonely little snail in there. I sterilized the tank and put the snail in a jar for several days where it thrived on carrots and gross murky water. We bought more dam fish and had another go at it all. With all the rookie mistakes out of the way and a multitude of fishicides on our hands, we were much more deliberate and careful to do everything right the first time. Our guppies are now getting knocked up every couple weeks and sometimes birthing at night while we sleep, which means only a couple babies survive out of about 18. the rest are snacks for the other fish. The snail still happily thrives as though no epic catastrophe ever occurred. It scurries all around and still throughly enjoys a good carrot rodeo.

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