Traveling the Fishkill

You know when you go on vacation to Vermont for a couple days and a motherfucker kills all your pet fish?

Yeah.

I can't blame Quint too much--I kinda like the bastard. (Full disclosure: he lived on my couch for the past two weeks.) But there I was, tapping some ass in Vermont (tapping some ass, v trans.: playing a board game in a motel room with one's family), and the man appears on my cell phone. "Hold on a minute, baby," I say.

"What?" say Mom and Dad.

"Nevermind. Quint! What shakes?"

"Uh, hey, ahh, your catfish are dead."

"Oh, oh well. That sucks." And it did indeed suck. Not suck like "Wow! Dad just left town with the 13-year-old neighbor girl" suck, but suck like "The Mets just traded for Anthony Young" suck. It's a low-level suck that lingers for a long time. It's like the new King Kong.

(ADD note: Good god, Stacked is the best show ever. It features Christopher Lloyd and Pamela Anderson's breasts, Carnegie and Andrew, the Mellon twins.)

So right. Lost two catfish, which was disappointing but not too disappointing, because they'd only been part of the family for about a week. They didn't even have names. And one of them ate another fish the night we got them. But still. It was like losing those weird cousins who've killed someone and were assholes at family gatherings but were family nonetheless. I got over it, and lost the board game. The next day when Quint told me I lost the little black one, that was rough. She'd been pregnant. So we didn't just lose one fish. We lost six hundred.

Then today during breakfast he's kind enough to tell me we've lost Monroe and Gandhi, the guppies. The original two. The only two that had names to begin with. So now I sit here with only two nameless little suckers remaining in a tank that's covered with algae. Quint, what the hell did you do? I know you hate fish--after all, you were eaten by one--but these were freshwater fish! They're different!

Goddamn. Now I have to spend the rest of my night up to my elbows in algae.