Thursday, October 10, 2013

Aquatic Life Series: LFD (not LSD), Petey and the Foundation to Save Him (Not the Other 6 Fish in the Tank)


I decided to combine two aquatic pet stories for this blog post.  For one thing, I don't know how exciting it is to write about both of these stories individually.  More truthfully, I think I attributed some of one of the stories to the wrong African Dwarf Frog.  Does it make me a bad pet owner that I can't recall what happened with each frog?  Or is it totally normal because I have had 4 African Dwarf Frogs which is weird enough and there's like NO way to tell them all apart?  Either way, this is the LAST in the aquatic life series. So without further ado...


Story 1:  At some point in my college career I went and bought a 4th African Dwarf Frog.  In hindsight, I think he is the frog that I brought back and forth between Purdue and Chicago.  What I can recall is that I gave him the best name of any frog ever in the whole world: Little Froggie Dude.  He lived in the same tank as all the other frogs.  One day, when I was trying to move him from the tank to his travel cup in order to clean out his tank and put new clean water in there, he took a flying leap from the net and landed on the carpeted floor.  SMALL brown frog, brown carpet, FAST jumping little brown frog on brown carpet.  It took about 5 minutes to corner the little fucker and make him hop in the now empty travel cup, close it and run to the bathroom to put water in it before he died.  He did die.  Eventually.  Not as a result of the jumping all over the floor incident.

Story 2:  The second semester of my senior year, I moved in with Jason.  Inside our sweet, very haunted old house (a story for another day) there was a large wooden bar...within which there were a plethora of liquor bottles and paraphernalia AND a HUGE fish tank.  It had all these decorations and fake plants and FISHES!  So many fishes...okay 7 fishies!  It felt like a doctors office fish tank with some awesome cichlids and other cool fishies.  I decided to name them - naturally - and my favorite was an orange cichlid that I named Petey.  I do not know why.  I also don't remember any of the names I gave the other fishies.  I don't even remember if the other fishies lived throughout my time in the house...  I clearly played favorites.  After a while, Petey's fins were looking bare and sad.  He started looking lackluster about living in our fish tank and I got worried that he was depressed.  Maybe one of the other fishes was being mean to him.  Maybe he was being ganged up on.  I'm not sure what fishies think about when they exhibit muted colors and slow swimming, but I knew it wasn't good.  Jason and I decided separating him from the other fishies would be the right thing to do since cichlids attack the weak.  Fucking pescibals (cannibal fish?  maybe?)  We put him in a large "temporary tank" but I was worried still, so I started the SPF: Save Petey Fund.  I think I was going to raise enough money to give him his own large tank with happy things so he could live as long as possible without the taunting and mean spirits of the other fish.  I raised $3.  And he died.  Depressing, yes...but it's nice to know that at 20 years old I still had the childlike belief system that a fundraiser and pretty things could make a fish live longer.  Petey already lived there when I moved in.  I believe he was already living there before Jason moved in.  I imagine he could have been 7 years old or something and that's a long LONG life for a fish.  I keep telling myself that.

End.

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