Fish F*ck In It

The ocean is basically just a giant orgy.

There.

I said it.

I mean, think about it. How many times have you viewed a program along the lines of the Blue Planet series and watched them show you the mating techniques of a sea urchin, or a coral reef? You don’t see a sweet little courtship ritual with one purple, spiny critter sliding up to another with flowers and chocolates, going out to dinner, and maybe a film, and then the first critter inviting the second up to its apartment to see its etchings. You don’t see the ‘27th Annual Great Barrier Reef Coral Polyp Cotillion and Bake Sale — proceeds to fund the Coral High School marching band’s trip to the Marianas Trench Division A Competition’, with all the awkward teenage polyps segregating into little groups of girl polyps and boy polyps, afraid to talk to each other or make the first move.

No, of course not. That would be civilized.

What do you see instead? Great hulking masses of urchin sperm being released wantonly into the abyss! Corals shamelessly spewing forth their reproductive components to be carried away on the whims of the tide! Clouds of gametes swirling in the communal soup! Hapless haploids with no direction, no guarantee that they will fulfill their sole purpose! I can almost hear the strains of Monty Python’s ‘Every Sperm is Sacred’ coming from the nearest Catholic sea-church, the Cardinal Tetras prostrating themselves before the altar, praying for the sins of their fishy brethren. Never mind the fact that they can’t see the altar through all the coral jizz and urchin spunk floating around, mingling with… well, just about everything, really.

Also never mind that cardinal tetras are actually freshwater tropical fish. I was cultivating an image. So sue me. (God knows the Catholic church will want my head on a pike for that last bit.)

Also also never mind that cardinal tetras are so named because of their predominantly red coloring and not because they look like mid-level church officials.

But I digress.

We were talking about fish sex. There are multitudes of ocean-dwelling creatures that reproduce in the same mass hopeful fashion as corals and urchins. They swim and concertina and suction around in their watery environs, spreading their seed like it’s no big deal, willfully ignoring the fact that maybe the other fish don’t want to swim around in their baby batter.

It’s indecent!

And it’s not just the other creatures that live in the sea that have to deal with it.

Think about it. Every time you go away for a well deserved tropical vacation and decide to take in a little swim in the delightfully warm turquoise waters you are swimming in fish spendings. Once you set foot in that water, you are — consciously or unconsciously — entering into a mass oceanic bacchanal. You are bathing in the juices of a thousand aquatic petite morts. A million marine O-faces were made in that half-cup of water you accidentally swallowed when you came up to breathe and a wave got you in the face.

It’s no wonder you’re dying for a cigarette by the time you get back to your beach towel.

It makes me wonder how much of the ocean is actually ocean, and how much of it is fish splooge. And for that matter, how much of it is fish waste? You’re not just swimming in fish wiener sauce, you’re also getting covered in fish shit. How many parts per million (or however they measure these things) of seawater is actually seawater?

Quick! Someone get me a grant writer! This is Very Important Research! These are questions that must be answered! For science!

Of course, there are a few select species living in our world’s oceans that have truly beautiful mating rituals. Seahorses dance. There is a species of puffer fish that creates stunning ‘nests’ in the sand on the ocean floor to woo its mate. The French Angelfish mates for life! How delightful! How thoughtful! How very unique and, frankly, adorable!

Oh well. That whole ‘survival of the fittest’ thing means that in order to perpetuate the species some critters have had to resort to flinging their baby-making goo into the ether and hoping for the best, the unpleasant side effect being the fact that everyone else then has to wade through their efforts to either exist — in the case of other ocean dwellers — or engage in aquatic recreation.

I will leave you with the following — a paraphrase of W.C. Fields injected into a flashback sequence from ‘Archer’:

This post brought to you by the 23-second video the Monterey Bay Aquarium put up on Twitter about urchin reproduction. HOW DOES FISH PORN NOT VIOLATE THE TWITTER TERMS OF SERVICE?!*

*I am not actually offended by fish porn.

More Dollars than Sense

consumerism — noun (derogatory), the preoccupation of society with the acquisition of consumer goods

We’re all guilty of it to some extent. Don’t try to deny it! We all have something of the magpie in us. Our quest for stuff can stem from a place of one-upmanship, searching for meaning, or having been injected with packrat genes, but you can’t deny that we exist in a society where the things define the person. To paraphrase, ‘The stuff makes the man!’

I wonder when it started. Did Urgh leave the cave one morning and look across at Grog’s cave and think, “Grog have new mammoth skin door on cave. Me do one better. Me get saber-tooth cat skin door!”? Did Mrs. Urgh send their cave-kids to cave-school in nothing but designer vole-fur tunics? We will never know for sure, but I’d be willing to bet that the pursuit of newer, shinier, and better started about as early as Adam.

“Eve, darling, you simply must upgrade to these organic, cruelty-free fig leaves!”

...apparently Adam was flaming.

Anyway, fast forward a few gazillion years, and now we’ve got the trappings of affluence. Class systems developed over the millennia, and they were based on — guess what — material wealth. The Haves ruled over the Have Nots. It is a truth universally acknowledged that one man, in possession of an iPhone, must be in want of the iPad, iPod, MacBook, and Apple Watch to go with it — and if he has these things, he must be a Big Deal. We’ve been conditioned to base our worth on our accumulated belongings at the expense of our actual selves and to the benefit of the corporations.

And it starts so early in life! I remember lunch boxes and sneakers being status symbols as early as preschool. The fads changed from year to year, but there was always something that was cool, something that was ‘in’. I was never either of those things, mostly because I was born cynical, and maybe that just served to heighten my awareness of my peers and their pursuit of the things that would make them appear to be upwardly mobile.

Ha! Mobile. There’s one. The old Nokia plastic rectangle. If you had one of those in 1999, you were something, man. Especially if it had a novelty case.

It extends to everything, really. The cars we drive, the places we eat, our personal technology, what we wear, where we shop (for anything), the trends and styles we follow… it’s endless, and it’s relentless. I mean, it extends to coffee, for fuck’s sake! My office supplies coffee — free coffee — but we still have a handful of people who go out daily to get Starbucks. The free coffee isn’t great, no, but it sure as hell beats five bucks a day on a frou-frou latte!

I certainly don’t live in a glass house on this subject. I have my own brand loyalties: Ray-Ban, Samsung, Prismacolor, Chevron, Best Foods… (Seriously, don’t ever buy house-brand mayonnaise. That’s just wrong.) It’s not wrong to want to have nice things. It’s nice to have nice things. Everybody likes nice things — because they’re nice. If you have the means to buy yourself and your kids/significant others/whoever fun and new and exciting essential and/or non-essential items, you get down with your bad self. I fully condone buying things (within your means) that you genuinely desire because they interest you.

What I find ridiculous is when people refuse to have anything that isn’t somehow designer, or promoted by some famous person, or the latest and greatest because God forbid they should be caught using last year’s model of whatever. If you live your life thinking that if it ain’t Versace you’re somehow subhuman, then you, friend, are the advertiser’s dream consumer. You have fallen for their trap. You have seen the water at the bottom and tumbled head first into the pitcher plant. There is no need to have a new phone every year, or a new car every five, or wear nothing but Burberry, or only use Aveeno because you’ve never gotten over your Jennifer Aniston obsession from when you were in junior high! There just isn’t! Think about what you could do with all the money you didn’t spend on labels if you pooled it up for a year. I bet it’s more than you’d think.

I know you’re going to do what you’re going to do, and that’s fine. Personally, I just look at it this way; “Does the old one still work? Will this alternative brand of the same item accomplish the same thing? Hooray! I saved $15!”

My hat is off to the advertisers, really. I mean, if they can make Pennzoil look sexy, then I guess they deserve to have us all clamoring to buy their shit.

Now, do you really need that fancypants cup of coffee?


Dilbert is the property of Scott Adams

The Human Mind is a Fragile Thing

Last Saturday I went to visit my ninety-three-year-old grandmother.

Early last week, she took a turn in the health department, and the memo went out that “If you want to see her, you should do it soon, because this might be it, folks.” It turned out that by Saturday she was much improved, but since I had already made the commitment to go see her, I went anyway.

My grandmother has been positively loopy for years now, and it’s been a steady decline. She has moments of startling lucidity and then will turn on a dime and not know who you are even though she addressed you by your name three minutes before. No joke; she knew me when I got there and for the first hour, and then I went to the kitchen to wash my hands after petting the dogs and when I came back, BOOM, no recollection. I sometimes feel I ought to be more upset by this, but I’m just not. The whole situation borders on the comedic, and if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry, so I’ll laugh, thanks very much.

I don’t know about you, but it makes me wonder at the idiosyncrasies of the brain as an organ. I mean, here’s a lump of gray tissue full of things that make connections and control your movement and allow you to feel. It’s a fucking marvel. But it’s a marvel that can be derailed by the oddest things. A little bit of fluid in the wrong place, a bump to the noggin of any strength, a set of synapses that synapse the wrong way, or simply time — sometimes it’s a tiny thing, sometimes it’s massive, and sometimes it’s in between, but, on the whole, it’s all weird.

I did a five-month stint working in an assisted living facility and I cannot begin to make a dent in the list of the seriously odd things I learned about the aging human brain simply through observation and experience. The residents ran the gamut from just a little forgetful to full-blown Alzheimer's and dementia, and with the latter set you never knew just what you were going to be dealing with at any given moment. I don’t mean to make it sound like the memory care unit was on par with Arkham Asylum — it wasn’t. It was just… a very, very odd place. You had to adjust your own mind to their wavelength. You had to think differently.

It was exhausting.

With most of the residents ‘out front’, the ones who still maintained a degree of independence, it was usually just a matter of reminders.

“I’m really glad your cat didn’t swallow that button you were worried about, Mrs. Whosit. Can you please take your pills?”

“No, Mr. Thing, it’s nine o’clock in the evening. You must have fallen asleep. Breakfast isn’t until tomorrow morning.”

In the memory care unit, I could sometimes be three different people before lunchtime. There was one dear old thing who thought I was her granddaughter, another one who thought we went to grade school together and that’s where we were going every time I showed up, and another one who was just very, very angry all the time and would only do what I needed her to do if I was insufferably obsequious. (Hey, it worked, and that was all that mattered.)

The worst part was taking a step back and remembering that these people were once independent human beings with families and jobs and hobbies. We had a retired ballet dancer, a retired professor, a retired high-level civil servant, and yet here they were, unable to decipher their own medicine routines. How they got there was different in each case — a disease or episode that affected a part of the brain or simply the toll of time — but it certainly gives you perspective to see once-great minds reduced to not remembering they had oatmeal half an hour ago.

I only lasted five months at that job because it was by far the most stressful work I had ever done in the whole of my life up to that point. I was literally responsible for people’s lives, and that was just too much for me in the end. It was incredibly valuable, though, because the following year I started to lose grandparents, and I knew in Technicolor detail what was going to happen. I knew about mottling. I knew what the ‘death rattle’ sounded like. I knew all the comfort measures to take with someone on their way out. Dead bodies weren’t an issue.

But it wasn’t ever really the physical act of dying that got to me, it was the road to get there, and the toll it could take on a person’s loved ones. You don’t want to remember people like that. You want to remember them when they were active and joyful and cognizant.

I can’t help feeling that it would be easier for everyone involved if we just hit our ‘sell-by’ date and poofed into oblivion without all this faffing about with brain deterioration.

Right?

Sorry, Charlie.

Those of you who read this blog through the Blogger mobile app/site/whatever are probably blissfully unaware of the fact that I have a rather twee little biography section off to one side of the screen which is apparently only viewable in the full website version of this cockamamie thing. (BTW, if you know how to make that not be a thing, please let me know.) I bring this up because this little ‘About Me’ blurb was inspired by Charlie Brooker's poem about The Sun, presented on 10 O’Clock Live on (or about) the 15th of February, 2012, and I bring that up because this whole endeavor is, in part, Mr. Brooker’s fault.

I suppose I should be more specific.

Late last year I was snuffling around down the rabbit hole of ‘Contemporary British Comedians, Writers, and Television Presenters’ and, via a foray into the territory of David Mitchell, I discovered the angry, sardonic, hilarious glory that is Charlie Brooker (who you may also recognize as the writer of the popular Netflix series Black Mirror). So off I trotted to Amazon to pick up a few of his books — anthologies of his weekly article for The Guardian, among other things. One shipping period and several work-lunchtimes later, I came across this gem.

“Ooooh! Advice from Charlie about writing! He’s awesome! This will be awesome!”

And it was.

In the way only Mr. Brooker could make it awesome.

The gist of his advice is: If you want to write, you should get a deadline.

That’s it.

That’s all he offered.

But guess what?

It works.

This is ::checks calendar:: week fifteen of me pounding out one of these with a deliverable of six o’clock AM Pacific on Thursday. In the beginning I was concerned about being able to come up with content on a weekly basis. “What am I going to talk about? Nothing is ever that interesting in my life. This is going to be a disaster!” Once I decided to let go of that worry (And it’s a Big Deal that I did, I have generalized anxiety disorder, for fuck’s sake!) I began to realize that the world was always offering me intriguing, thought-provoking, and occasionally completely ludicrous things to explore. Sometimes they fall flat, sure, but they still show up on time, every week, like clockwork.

For me, however, it’s not enough just to throw the words (however thoughtfully) onto the page and have done with it. Everything I post here goes through my Resident Volunteer Editor/Proofreader, without whom I would surely die. (Shoutout — Love you, Pip!) When my fingers work faster than my brain, she manages to un-screw whatever I’ve made a complete hash of. I guess what I’m really getting at here is that there’s more to this writing lark than readers may appreciate. I’m not saying you’re a pile of ungrateful twits, I’m saying that, like most things, the process is far less straightforward than you might think. Let’s explore mine, shall we?

• Thursday AM — “Oh, good, it posted as scheduled”
• 24-hour period of not thinking about blogs
• Somewhere between Saturday and Tuesday — Something is written
• Wednesday evening — “Pip! Help! Fix it!”
• Thursday AM — See above
  

That’s the weekly schedule. When I actually sit down to write, it’s a whole other kettle of fish. In the writing of this post, specifically, I have:

• Checked Twitter no fewer than 87 times
• Eaten breakfast
• Written 6 words
• Solved world hunger
• Had two cups of coffee
• Topped up the rat kibble and given Big Dutch a scratch
• Written 3 sentences
• Checked my YouTube subscriptions twice to see if anyone has posted anything
• Gotten out the space heater because it’s frickin’ freezing in here
• Reapplied chapstick 5 times
• Discovered the cure for cancer
• Written an entire paragraph(!)
• Debated wearing my unicorn headband around the house, just because (Decision was rendered against, because it was all the way over there)
• Marveled at the existence of the universe
• Thought about topping up the water in the fish tank and not done it
• Told myself to knuckle down already and get on with it
• Written one more sentence
• Taken a nap as a reward for writing said sentence and also because it’s Sunday, dammit
• Binge-watched an entire season of Archer on Netflix (BTW, they’re taking it off on March 14th, so if it’s on your list, you’d better get on it.)
• Realized it’s Tuesday and panicked
• Made Pip want to murder me and had 27 embarrassing errors and a sizeable handful of suggestions for improving just about everything sent back to me
• Posted
  

I will point out here that it is inadvisable to piss off your editor.

It’s a flawed process, admittedly, but it’s significantly less harmful to the internal organs than Hunter S. Thompson's.

Bottom line, that proverbial fire under one’s ass (I totally just realized that was a pun, and I apologize. But I’m not changing it.) really ought to be all one needs to get the lead out and produce something already. Deadlines are deadlines, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do to stop them. They are a necessary evil if you want to accomplish anything. You really shouldn’t be afraid of them, they’re there to help you, not hurt you. 

Of course, our hero Mr. Brooker also said, “Just pay someone larger than you to kick your knees until they fold the wrong way if you don’t hand in 800 words by five o’clock. You’ll be amazed at what comes out.”

But I ignored that part.

Moral: Only take 50% of any advice offered by Charlie Brooker.

Sorry, Charlie.

Google is a Pessimist.

Every morning, a little notification comes up on my phone. It tells me the approximate number of minutes it will take me to get to work via my usual route, and the current level of traffic along the way. The funny thing is that it sometimes includes editorial commentary.

“Time to Work: 23 minutes. This is the fastest route despite moderate traffic that is getting worse.”

Way to be defeatist, Google. Your glass is half empty. And it’s getting emptier.

Now, it used to be that I tuned into the local news radio station to get a traffic report, and I had to tune in at just the right time because they only did it ‘on the eights’. If you missed it, you had to wait eight minutes to get the next one, and by that point, you were sometimes in the thick of a stop-and-go situation you could easily have avoided had you caught the previous traffic report. These days, however, with the advent of all these techno-gizmos we insist we need otherwise we shall surely DIE, I can check the traffic from bed, from the bathroom once I exit the shower, from the kitchen table as I collect my things to take with me for the day, outside after I lock the front door, as soon as I sit down in the car, and on and on and on. There’s really no reason NOT to know how long it’s going to take me to get to work and what to expect along the way.

This is useful. Creepy and Big Brother-y, but useful.

The thing that provides me with endless giggles is the addition of the commentary.

“...despite moderate traffic that is getting worse.”

I’m not sure any of you quite realize what this means.

THE TECHNOLOGY IS TAKING ON A PERSONALITY.

It puts me immediately in mind of Marvin the Paranoid Android from the Hitchhiker’s Guide series by Douglas Adams. For those of you not indoctrinated into the world of the intergalactic nomad, Marvin is a failed prototype robot afflicted with severe depression and boredom due to the fact that he is far superior in intellect to everything and everyone around him, yet they insist that he perform the most mundane tasks imaginable. One of his more famous quotes is,

“Here I am, brain the size of a planet…”

Followed by a dissertation on whatever pedestrian thing he’s been asked to do and why it’s ridiculous for him to be doing it.

I think you see where I’m going, here. Google is turning into Marvin.

Google isn’t just a thing we use to search for cat videos anymore. It is seeping into our lives in so many helpful ways that we’re not really noticing the fact that we basically live in Google World at this point, and it’s getting worse.

Not that I have anything against Google, obviously, I use their platforms and apps and services and whatnot, and I vastly prefer them to the alternatives. HOWEVER, I am becoming increasingly aware of the amount of Google in my life. Targeted ads, predictive searches, the whole schmear. Does it make things easier? Yes. Does it allow me to see and hear and know and discuss and all manner of other things which, ten years ago, would have been far more difficult to acknowledge, understand, debate, and research? Hell yes.

Is it getting a little too 1984? FUCK YES.

Am I going to curtail my activities due to this realization? Yeah, probably not. It’s progress. It’s inescapable these days, unless you move to the middle of the woods, eat squirrels and mushrooms, grow a five-foot beard and start calling yourself Non-Techis the Luddite, Great Prophet of the Technological KABOOM Yet to Come.

And I don’t fancy myself in a beard, to be honest.

In the meantime, I’m having a decent giggle about Google’s transformation into Marvin. Here Google is, brain the size of the entire internet and who knows what else, and it’s been reduced to telling me how long it’s going to take me to get to work in the morning. It could be curing cancer or brokering Mid-East peace treaties or reducing greenhouse gasses, but no, it’s telling me I might want to consider taking the boulevard rather than the freeway today. Pathetic.

Makes you wonder if maybe, just maybe, Google has become sentient enough to be a harbinger of its own demise.

“...it’s getting worse.”

All I know is, if I ever get a traffic report followed by a moan about how the diodes down Google’s left side are killing it and have been for several thousand years, I’m going to seriously reconsider my stance on me in a beard.