Gone fishin'

Technically I’m a pet owner. But since those pets happen to be goldfish, I get to play by a unique set of rules.

Unlike a dog or cat owner, I don’t have to be remotely responsible. The only thing required to keep these suckers alive is sprinkling a dose of flakey fish food over their luxurious habitat, a 10-gallon tank with more fake plants than a dentist’s office. My two bug-eyed companions, Cuff and Link, go absolutely ballistic when this happens, scrambling over themselves with a coffee drinker’s hopped-up frenzy, then settling back down into their normal routine of not doing much at all. I watch this happen for a while, I make absurd baby noises they either can’t hear or don’t care about, and then I leave the room and read books about flesh-eating mutants. A swell arrangement, all told.

Fish are the microwave dinners of the pet world. They’re not a hundred percent satisfying, but man, are they easy.

Maintaining a viable aquarium is a simple task even for a knuckleheaded college kid, which was my job description at one time. For 21-year-old me, “responsibility” was still just a word in the dictionary, as I spent much of my non-studying hours trying to decide whether Southern Comfort was delicious or the most vile swill this side of Milwaukee’s Best. (It’s the latter.) Pulling good grades was about the only task to which I could be entrusted; something as hassle-free as a houseplant would have withered and died under my absent-minded care. Heck, if I’d had a fern it would have picked itself up by its roots and walked out in frustration, marking the first time in evolutionary history that a plant developed the capacity to show disgust. There’s a TV show in there somewhere. Remind me to pull some notes together.

But there were fish. Oh, were there fish. Big ones, little ones. Colored, monochrome. Cute, butt-freakin’-ugly. I plowed through a great deal of those suckers during the first couple of years the aquarium was operative, mostly because I was trying to keep tropical fish and I was bad at it -- at least when it came to the early stages of the fishes’ lives. Could have been the pH level, could have been my dime store heater, but whatever the reason, I’d score 10 fish and in less than a day half of them would be floating at the surface, bobbing like buoys in the wake of an ocean liner. It’s depressing when you’re responsible for a life and you fail at it, even if the life in question is worth about $1.29 to a pimpled pet score cashier.

The fish that remained, though -- they’d live for years. I was doing something right, and that something involved little more than sprinkling flakes on the surface and fogging the glass with my gawking. Sometimes I wonder what fish are thinking -- if they “think” at all -- when someone puts their nose to the glass and peers in at them. Do they understand that there’s a giant mammal head just inches away? Do they notice anything else that’s on the table, like the half-empty packet of AA batteries, or the Green Lantern action figure twisted into a lewd position? It’d be interesting to know what’s going through their minds.

Which is one of the drawbacks of fish, really: You can’t communicate with them on any meaningful level, aside from knocking on the aquarium lid and scaring the everloving bajesus out of them. You can communicate with dogs. They understand a fair amount of words, and they know how to signal when they want food, attention, the blood of an evil groundhog, etc. Cats are tricker because they’re schmucks, but you can learn to read the signals; some of those signals, like rubbing against your shins and making you trip face-first into the china cabinet, are a little clearer than we’d like ’em to be.

Fish just swim. They don’t cuddle or purr or pass gas while lying next to us in bed, filling the room with an eye-watering fog that could melt the chain mail off the back of a Medieval knight. They exist, and that’s that. Their greatest liability is also their greatest strength; what they lack in their capacity for closeness they make up for in ease of sustainability. That’s why, as simple as their care was 12 years ago, it’s even simpler today. I’ve learned responsibility, I can fake maturity, and when I come home from work I toss out all those life lessons and revert back to a post-adolescent stupor -- dumping flakes onto the water’s surface to watch Cuff and Link battle it out like a pair of half-starved sumo wrestlers slapping bellies over a prize cannoli.

Despite all that, keeping fish as pets is a curious arrangement. They’re a species we regularly scarf as a main course at Applebee’s, yet the ones too small to be filling we keep alive for a cheap spectacle. We spend more time tending to their habitats than we do to the fish themselves. And we name them as a formality because it’s expected. Cuff and Link are cute monikers, but they never fetch my slippers when I ask them to.

I think what it boils down to is that life likes to be surrounded by life, even if it’s elementary life, like fish or carnations, lizards or hyacinths. Not to get all hippy-dippy, but it’s commonly accepted science that all life can be traced back to a common ancestor -- meaning we’re all connected, even if in the most tangential of ways. The strictest of isolationists can still find something to like about a golden-scaled buddy zig-zagging through the hollow center of a plastic shipwreck, emerging with a lilt to his lips that looks suspiciously like a smile.

In five minutes I’m off to buy them a giant skull for their swimming pleasure. It’s about the closest I can come to spoiling them.