Rock 'n Roll Fish

This may be of no interest to anyone, but I feel the need to talk about it so here it is.  I had to kill one of my fish a few days ago.  His name was Keith Richards and he was perfectly healthy but I just had to do it.  I didn’t step on him or beat him to death or anything like that, I just flushed him down the toilet.  If he is anything like his namesake though there is a good chance that he is still alive, down in the sewer, partying to the wee hours.  I did not want to commit fishslaughter, but I made an executive decision that it was necessary.  It all started two weeks ago when I noticed that our fish tank was getting a little green with algae…more than the one algae-eating Otocinclus fish that we had in the tank could handle.  So my 3-year old daughter Autumn and I went to the pet store to get 2 or 3 more of the little 2” tank-cleaners.

 

Unfortunately there was only one Otocinclus left in the store, but they had some Spotted Catfish on sale that were kind of cute.  The sales lady said they are not algae eaters, but bottom-feeders that eat poop and whatever other crud that sinks to the bottom of a fish tank.  Cool!  We have two rather large Fantail Goldfish that poop like crazy so I thought the catfish would be a welcome addition.  The description tag on the tank said the catfish only get to 2” when full-sized and they like to be in schools of 3 or more.  There were exactly 3 catfish left.  Perfect.  So we bought the 3 poop-eating Spotted Catfish and the lone Otocinclus and headed home.

 

On the way Autumn decided to name the catfish Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, and the Otocinclus of course would be Charlie Watts.  Autumn loves the Beatles and we already have fish named John, Paul, George and Ringo, but she has been getting into the Rolling Stones lately and she wanted to include them in our fish tank.  So when we got home we happily introduced the Stones to the Beatles and watched them scoot around and explore their cool new home.

 

Everything was great for a few days.  Mick, Keith and Ronnie hung out together slumming it on the bottom and seemingly doing well.  But then one morning I woke up and there was Ron Wood laying on his side gasping for air.  The end was near and I’m guessing his lifetime of heavy smoking finally caught up to him.  He was stone cold dead when I checked back in on him 10 minutes later.  I scooped him up from the bottom when my kids weren’t looking, ran him over to the bathroom, said a few kind words and flushed him up to that great fish-tank in the sky.

 

Now I was a little worried though, because there were only two Spotted Catfish left and they like to school in groups of three or more.  Oh well, I would just go get another one when I got the chance I decided.  I watched as Mick and Keith stuck together, completely ignoring the Beatles floating around above them.  George Harrison is a long, thin Chinese Catfish who tried to join the duo when Ronnie left, but Mick and Keith would have none of it and turned their backs on George whenever he cautiously approached.  By the next day though I noticed that Mick wasn’t keeping up with Keith.  He was just moping around, not moving much while Keith was happily bouncing around having a great time.  By that night Mick was dead.  Laying on his side in almost the same place that Ronnie took his last breath.

 

Now I was worried about Keith Richards on his own without his mates.  However I need not have worried about Keith.  He is apparently made of tougher skin than most and has the ability to adapt to any situation.  As soon as Mick left, Keith quickly latched on to Lucas...literally.  Lucas is the largest and oldest fish in the tank and the only one not named after a rock star.  I got him several years ago, before Autumn could talk and ask questions about who is singing and playing guitar on her favorite songs.  Lucas is a beautiful orange Fantail Goldfish about 8 inches long.  Well, he’s beautiful except for the large, white golf-ball sized tumor growing on one side of him.  It started out as a little white lump about two years ago and it just keeps growing and growing.  Now it looks like somebody has super-glued a golf ball to the left side of his body.  Although sometimes it catches on plants and stuff when he swims by, it does not seem to really bother him much.  He eats tons of food and is always alert and seemingly happy.

 

Until Keith Richards started hanging with him that is.  Continuing to snub the Beatles and going right for the head dog, I noticed Keith always at Lucas’s side.  I thought that was nice…Lucas taking Keith under his wing…until I noticed that he wasn’t just hanging with him, he was hanging on him.  And not just hanging on him, but eating him!  Keith latched himself onto Lucas’s tumor and was slowly eating it away.  Over the course of 2 days the top half of the tumor was beginning to disappear.  Hmm.  Was that a good thing?  On the one hand he is eating his friend which on the surface seems like a bad thing, but on the other hand he is only eating the tumor so maybe that is a good thing?

 

Keith didn’t start eating Lucas until Ronnie and Mick died, so I decided to head back to the pet store with Autumn and get a couple new Spotted Catfish for Keith to hang with.  Maybe then he would leave Lucas alone.  The pet store did not have any in stock however, and when I told the sales lady about Keith’s fettish for tumors she thought that it might not be good for Lucas and to keep an eye on them.  I was worried but Lucas did not seem to mind Keith’s cannibalism much, just swimming around happily like always with little Keith munching away on him.

 

The next morning I got up though and the tumor was looking bad.  The top half was completely gone and it was down to a blood-red nub.  Keith was still right there eating away and I decided that was enough.  Keith was cool, but I’d only known him for 2 weeks whereas Lucas was old-school…my buddy, my pal, my rock in the tank.  Keith had to go.

 

I grabbed the net but Keith sensed the jig was up as he fought courageously for his life, swimming with a speed and agility that I never knew he had in him.  He darted everywhere, in and out of all the underwater plants and fake turtles and underwater buildings till I was starting to think that I would never be able to catch him.  Finally I cornered him with the net though and brought him kicking and screaming up to the surface.  I felt bad, but I took one more look at Lucas’s bloody stump and knew that was it.  Keith darted around in the toilet for a bit, I said goodbye, and then he was off with a woosh to the next party.

 

It should be noted that the lone remaining Rolling Stone Charlie Watts is doing just fine.  The other Otocinclus Paul McCartney took to him right away and they became fast friends.  In addition, we have since gone back and got two more Otocinclus which Autumn named Princess Leia and Anakin and the four of them are buds.  Mick, Keith and Ronnie were good fish, but it just goes to show that rockers live fast and sometimes die young, whereas Star Wars characters will probably live on forever.

P!NK

I just got back from picking up my ‘Pink’ ticket for next Tuesday night!  The show is completely sold out, and tix on Ebay/Craiglist have all been going for at least $200.  I got it from Craigslist.  I had been watching Craigslist closely, checking practically every hour for the last week.  I called this latest ad minutes after it appeared online.  $90…lower level…9^th row!  I got it from a lady named Julie who told me on the phone she was going to take her two sons, but one has baseball practice and can’t go.  I told her that I would be her other son for the night.

 

Unfortunately I had to pick the ticket up from her husband, Jim.  He’s a State Farm agent and I had to go to his office.  He looked a little nervous when I walked through his door in my black leather biker jacket and jeans.  I’m sure he was sizing me up, knowing that I would be the guy sitting with his wife and son at a Pink concert.  I thought about pretending I was gay so he wouldn’t have to worry about me hitting on his wife, but then I thought that maybe then he’d worry that I would hit on his son.  So I figured I would just mention my wife to put him at ease.  I told him my wife thinks this whole ‘Pink’ thing is hilariously ridiculous and she can’t believe I am actually going to see her in concert. 

 

Either I was mumbling nervously or he wasn’t listening because then he wanted to know if she was going.  Nope…just me.  A 46 year old guy who likes Pink.  I tried to explain that I like a LOT of different music and I go to a LOT of different concerts, but that I never imagined in million years that I’d be going to see PINK.  Then I nervously told him that it all started last summer when I bought one of her cd’s at a garage sale for quarter just for the hell of it...and I loved it.  As I was talking though I could tell he still wasn’t listening to me.  He was just staring at me with a worried look on his face.

 

I thanked him for the generous price as I handed him the $90.  He looked at me for a little while longer as I mumbled some other unmemorable stuff.  Finally he handed me the ticket and slowly mentioned that I will be sitting with his wife and kid.  I said I would buy them a drink, and then I quickly amended that to ‘or popcorn or something’.  Then I got the hell out of there but I could feel him burning holes in my back with his eyes.  I wonder if his wife is hot.

Ghosts

Do you believe in ghosts, or spirits?  Do you ever get the feeling when you are alone that you are not alone?  Have you ever had anything weird happen to you that you can't explain?  Do you ever walk up the dark basement stairs and suddenly feel like somebody is right behind you and you run up as fast as you can to get away before it drags you back downstairs?  Do you ever watch those reality ghost-hunter shows on TV and think it has got to be fake, but then in the back of your mind you wonder...could it be real?

With the passing of our friend Karl Bremer from cancer on January 15th, the event has given me cause to think about spirits.  The very next day after Karl died I was in the gym working out and I was thinking about him.  Not sad stuff, but fun stuff...like him making jokes whenever I would invite him to go golfing with me and the guys.  Karl hated golfing and thought all golf courses should be turned into parks or nature preserves, so for fun I would always invite him to go along just to see what he would say.  Usually he would come up with something along the lines of:  "Thanks, but I would rather get a root canal while being waterboarded."

So I was laying on the bench press not lifting weights but thinking about Karl with a big smile on my face and suddenly it felt like Karl was with me.  He seemed content and it was like he was letting me know that he was all right where he was.  Just then a guy walks by me in the gym wearing a tee-shirt and on the back it read:  "Care for the city that care forgot".  It was a tee-shirt that Karl and I had helped create for a benefit concert that we had helped put on in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  Karl was totally with me as I layed there and although I was sad at his passing, in those moments I felt like it was okay for him now.  Certainly better than his last year that he struggled with cancer.

The next day I was emailing with my friend Dave S. Thompson and he'd had a similar experience.  He too felt Karl had come to him and was with him for a bit.  At Karl's 'Celebration Of Life' reception that his sweet wife Chris put on recently, people kept coming up to the podium and relaying similar experiences about Karl.  Marcy Baudoin said he came to her while she was awake, and Mack Starnes said Karl came to him in a dream.  Mack said he knew that he was dreaming and he also knew that Karl had passed, but in the dream he was talking with Karl on a phone and Karl wanted him to know he was doing fine.  Chris recently told me that Karl has visited her as well.

Has Karl or Karl's spirit been making a point of going around to his family and friends letting us know he's okay?  My wife Nadia said she has had the same experience with her dad after he died.  On many occasions he has visited her in her dreams and told her that it was okay and not to worry about him.  He still comes to visit her.  One time he even told her in a dream that our sick son Jack had an ear infection and then sure enough, the next day we took him in to the doctor and he had an ear infection.

In addition to that first-hand feeling of a spirit being with me from my recently passed friend, I have also dealt with a spirit or ghost in the house we live in now.  While Karl is a friendly spirit, our house-ghost is more of a mischievous ghost.  I think this particular spirit was concerned about our new presence and may have been testing us.  The first appearance occured shortly after we moved into our house in the summer of 2009.  We moved in June and our first child Autumn was born one month later, in July of 2009.

The entrance to our bedroom is through two large French doors that we had never used or closed at the time.  They had been swung all the way open since the day we moved in, and we had never closed them because we wanted to make sure we could hear Autumn if she fussed or cried.  Her bedroom was right across the hall from ours and in those early months she would would wake up frequently for milk or rocking.  So our bedroom doors were always open and after a while we did not even notice them.

One night in August a few weeks after Autumn was born and not even two months after we had moved into the house, Nadia went upstairs to bed first.  An hour later I went up quietly in the dark, trying not wake up Nadia as sleep was rare and precious during that time of our lives.  I slipped into the bathroom in our bedroom, closed the door, and then turned on the lights so I could brush my teeth and get ready for bed.

A couple of minutes later I turned off the bathroom light, opened the door and was about to slide into bed when I thought I heard Autumn fussing.  Sighing, I diverted from the bed and headed towards Autumn's room to check on her.  By now I knew my way around in the dark and I confidently headed across our room towards her door across the hall from our room, using large quick strides to get to Autumn quickly before she woke up Nadia.

Suddenly, SMASH!  I ran face-first into what felt like a wall and fell back on my ass!  What the f*ck?  Who put a wall here?!  Oh wait, I realized it wasn't a wall, it was the two large solid french doors that were now inexplicably closed.  Nadia of course woke up in confusion from the loud banging and wondered what the hell I was doing.  I was pissed, thinking that for some reason while I was in the bathroom she had got up from bed and decided to close the doors for the first time ever since we had moved in.  "Why in the hell did you close these doors?!" I hissed.

"What are you talking about?  I was sleeping!  I didn't close them!" she shot back.

She reasoned that I must have closed them behind me when I came up to bed.  But I knew for a fact that I had not.  I had never closed them before and I certainly had no reason to suddenly close them that night.  Since I didn't do it, she must have.  Did she do it as a joke?  I didn't get it.  She insisted that she was asleep the whole time and did not wake up until I ran into the doors.  I studied her face to see if she was joking.  I kept thinking she would suddenly crack a smile and admit that she had done it.  But she didn't waver and soon was pissed at me for accusing her of doing something she didn't do.

Well if she didn't do it, and I know I didn't do it, and our 1 month old baby didn't do it...then who did?  It was was weird and it felt weird.  Kind of spooky.  Was our new house haunted we joked?  But neither of us laughed and we didn't really talk about it after that.  I thought about it, especially at night when I would come up to bed and pass through the open doors, but we never talked about it.

Until exactly 1 year later.  It was August of 2010.  On July 19th we had celebrated Autumn's 1-year birthday with a family party...cake, presents, a helium-filled Sesame Street balloon, the whole bit.  A month later the red helium balloon was still around, but was getting lower and lower each day as the helium slowly leaked out.  It was tied to a long string that dragged along behind it.  The balloon lived on the main level of the house, usually in the livingroom where most of Autumn's toys were.  She enjoyed the balloon and would tug on the string and laugh as the images of Elmo and Cookie Monster bobbed up and down in front of her.  As the balloon got lower down to the ground though I eventually removed the string because I did not want Autumn to get tangled up in it or strangle herself with it.  So by then it was just a balloon, bouncing around on the main level of our house.

One Saturday morning I decided to take a shower upstairs in the bathroom in our bedroom.  Nadia was in the livingroom playing with Autumn.  I gave the balloon a kick and told Nadia I was heading up for a shower.  I remember thinking how we should get rid of the balloon as I didn't want Autumn to bite it and pop it and scare her, or for her to eat the plastic remains when it popped.  I got up to our bedroom, stripped naked, went into our bathroom, closed the door, sat on the toilet for a few minutes and read my Golf Digest magazine.  Then I reached into the shower and turned on the water.  I let it warm up for a bit and then I stepped into the water and slid the glass sliding door shut behind me.

As I was washing my hair I was suddenly startled by something hitting my head.  It totally freaked me out and I instinctively jerked my head to the side and swatted above me at the same time yelling: "Ahh!"  I looked up and realized it was the goddamn balloon!  I quickly went from feeling freaked out to feeling foolish though as I realized Nadia was playing a joke on me.  The glass door was all steamed up and I couldn't see through it so I slid it open with a sheepish grin on my face ready to take my ribbing from Nadia.

But she wasn't there.  That's weird I thought.  How in the world did she drop it over the top of the shower door onto me and then get out so fast?  And come to think of it, how did she do it so quietly?  The bathroom door sticks, especially in the summer and more especially when the shower heats it up, causing it to make a groaning sound when you open/close it.  I had heard nothing.  It was a good trick though, however she did it.

I tossed the balloon to the bathroom floor, finished my shower and then got out to dry off and get dressed.  When I was done I grabbed the balloon and walked downstairs to congratulate Nadia on getting me with her joke.  She was still sitting on the livingroom couch playing with Autumn and I said:  "Very funny, but how did you do it?  How did you get in and out so fast and without me hearing you?"

"What are you talking about?" she said with a sincerely puzzled look on her face.

I laughed and told her to stop, it was a good joke, but how did she do it?  But she still insisted she had no idea what I was talking about.  Suddenly I got incredibly creeped out, looked at the balloon and pushed it away from me.  As I watched it drop to the floor I let myself think the silly thought that the balloon was haunted.  Wait, no, not the stupid balloon, the house.  I explained to Nadia what had happened and we sat there trying to make sense of it.  How in the hell did this limp balloon with almost no helium in it, go from the main floor livingroom, up the stairs, around the corner into our bedroom, under or through the closed bathroom door, float up and over the shower doors and drop down onto my head?

There was no way to explain how it happened.  Even if for some reason I had grabbed it and brought it upstairs with me, it was not in the bathroom with me when I was sitting there reading my magazine with the door closed.  It is a very small bathroom.  Nowhere for it to hide.  Even if it had suddenly came to helium-life and had been floating up on the ceiling the whole time waiting for me to get in the shower, I would have seen it when I walked into the little bathroom.  Nadia again insisted she did not do it, that she was downstairs with Autumn the whole time I was in the shower, and no she did not see the balloon float away.  The last time she saw it was in the livingroom before I went upstairs, and then again when I brought it back downstairs after my shower.  Try as we might, there was just no way to explain how it happened.

So, what the hell?  Was our house just testing the newcomers?  Being funny?  Seeing if we had a sense of humor?  One strange thing and one completely unexplainable thing had happened to us in the first year that we lived there.  We have not had anything too weird happen since then though.  We both do have a good sense of humor and so do our kids, so hopefully the house likes us.  We love the house, but our family has doubled in size since we moved in and it has gotten seemingly smaller so we are going to add a 2-room upper/lower addition to it this summer.  I hope the house is cool with that.

So do I believe in ghosts?  I think I sort of have to.  I think that maybe when you die, before moving on to the ‘next place’ your spirit sticks around for awhile to make sure everything is okay.  And if it is NOT okay, maybe you stick around a lot longer…you become a ghost looking for peace.  I certainly don’t want to believe that dead is DEAD…as in there is nothing more, you’re worm food, done.  I believe there is a next place.  I like to think that it is going to be a cool place where time and space are not boundaries…like we could go back and see what it was like to be in the studio watching the Beatles make Sgt. Peppers, or what it was like to be a cave man, or to be in Jerusalem and see for myself if Jesus was a god or just some really good dude.

I hope when we die that we will be able to get the answers to all of life’s big mysteries...like how did the pyramids get made, who killed John F. Kennedy, is there life in other universes, and whether or not women really have a G-Spot.  I love life and I cherish every day that I am alive.  I never “kill” time because it is too precious.  Before I get out of bed every day I think about all of the cool things that are going to happen that day.  Whether it is going to be something big like going on vacation or something seemingly insignificant like building a fort with my daughter, it’s all good and important and makes life great.  So I do not ever want to die, but whenever I do I have a feeling the ‘next place’ will be pretty cool.