Leaping Lepranuses (I have no idea how to spell this fish name- much less pluralize it)!

I came home today from running errands to find a suicide fish. The fish we shall call L for the purposes of blogging leapt to his death at some point this morning. It’s not the first time he has “gotten out” of the tank. It’s just that no one was here to rescue him. We noticed odd behavior last night as he was nosing figure eights on the northern wall of the tank. He looked like he wanted out. There is a fairly small gap to jump through and I guess his genetic programming told him that the world was one big river. He should have known better having tested this theory on multiple occasions.

All his previous leaps occurred during feedings or cleanings where I had the top of the tank off. The first week we were here he jumped out and landed behind the TV. I had to move the entertainment center out and take off my shirt to use as a grasping aid. I knew the tank was too small for him and had been pricing 55 gallon tanks, but there is no point now as none of my other fish were in his league. Is it bad to post a picture of dead fish? I took one (a few). He was a seven to eight inch fish.



He’s not a fish I’ll replace. He was too aggressive and may have even killed my favorite Pleco way back when Jes and I first started dating. I had foolishly put my two largest fish in a tank together and L was making a habit of nipping the Pleco’s tail. I came home one day to find the Pleco in what can only be described as a crucifixion float. His fins were stretched wide and back like open arms. His head was at the top of the tank and his tail at the bottom. His spine was arched backwards with his bare belly facing out into the room. He had a huge hole in his belly that I believe L put there, but it was reminiscent of the centurion’s slash. I’ll never know for sure how the Pleco died, no curtains tore marking the hour, but I gave L his own tank after that so the Pleco died that other fish might live.



Now the betrayer fish, my Judas fish, has gone to his own grave – the dumpster out back actually – and will soon be recycled by an alley cat in the great circle of life. Does anyone else find amusement in the popularity of the Lion King in many Christian households? The central theme is Hindu or Buddhist emphasizing the metempsychosis of souls – this is the comforting notion that every mistake is tempered by the eventual intergalactic reset button in opposition to the Christian one-ride-around-the-park winner fit through the eye of a needle model we get from the Judaic line of thinking. Disney has long wrestled with these issues pondering as I do now whether all dogs go to heaven.



Death in the noon hour is a microcosmic moment for musings on mortality: will I, like my own fish out of water, pass from this world with all the insignificance of a flopping, gasping asphyxiation wondering what in the world went wrong with my latest and greatest plan for self improvement, a leap into an inhospitable something that makes me into nothing faster than a giggling sorority girl can order her sushi? It’s the riddle of the many and the one; there are more than six billion of us now in our interdependent struggles and the meaning of each tableau is hard to measure against a near infinity of options. If you’re looking for the appropriate “whoa” moment to pop your demographic cherry on, I recently heard a specialist on global population say that the majority of people alive right now have never spoken to someone else on a telephone. Stick that in your digital divide and smoke it.



I suppose context is key; the fish had a meaning in the context of his tank, removed from it he most closely resembles the well shaken etch a sketch or the daily shake of the food can in the larger tank of the dumpster diving possum. But for the grace of the moment, there go we.