Deep, Man. (Other Fish)

Member Name: Peakly

Product:	Other Fish
Date:	28/07/01 (136 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: ..........

Disadvantages: ..........

**** In a DVD fashion, my 100th opinion will feature extra cut-paragraphs and a collection of hilarious deleted titles. Keep scrolling at the bottom for each *****


- Why fish?

- Why not?

- Well, it’s stupid. You’re just picking some obscure subject so you can waffle on for 2000 words and bore everybody. It’s not going to help anyone make any decisions and you know it.

- Sure it will. It’ll help then decide if I like fish or not.

- Oh that’s just great. Real great. Now you’re just being childish.

- Am not.

- Am too!

- Am not.

- Am t… You see!? See what you’re doing here? It’s not even original for Christ’s sake – dialogue opinions are so last year. Face it – you’ve got nothing to say about fish that’s useful at all. Extra DVD features and fictitious conversations with yourself are just feeble attempts to bulk it out a bit so that people over-look how unuseful you’ve been. Admit it.



So there’s me, no more then twelve or thirteen years old. You remember the age. The opposing forces of immaturity and angst, pulling violently at your coat-tails. Still secretly fond of your transformer toys, yet utterly convinced of your future as a world leader/philosopher/hero . The early formation of believes you would later label agonistic. The realization that girls are pretty, and the eagerness to do something with your penis, though you’re not sure what exactly. You remember. Twelve or thirteen. Y’know, the best years.

It was at that golden age, that I had my first experience with fish, or at least the first I feel prepared to share with you all. Standard class trip to an aquarium centre. Rained in the morning, brightened up by lunch. Three hours on the bus. 300 sing-a-longs of Johnny had a pigeon (complete with swearing), 200 shouts t
o ‘sit down’ from the bus-driver, 13 incidents of GBH, 4 sweet-packets thrown, 2 pants wetted and 1, single tear, rolling down the cheek of our teacher Mrs. Wilson, which we all noted yet never mentioned ever again.

I was at the back of the group with Jackie Ping-Pong and Buttons Scholfield, talking cynically about the size of the centres ‘sharks’, in-between exaggerated brags about my pog collection. That’s when we reached the feeding room. A man with a red shirt and devastating acne-scars informed of the house rules – no shouting, no throwing anything in except the food-provided, and, most importantly, no leaning over the edge or, more stupidly, jumping in the pool. Anyone who did any of those things stood to be either severely scolded by our teachers, or subjected to the dangers of the tank.

And so to my experience. I wish I could say that I did something straight out of Denis The Menace, like disorientate the supervisors with a homemade smoke-bomb before scuba-diving into the tank just to cause mischief, but I didn’t. I fell in. Don’t ask me how, because I don’t know. All I know is that one minute I was trying to hit Jimmy Murray with my expandable ruler, and the next I was feeling the icy invasion of pool water in all my body cavities, coupled with the vague (probably imagined) nipping of fish at my toes. The pool was deep, and dark, and frightening. For at least 10 seconds, I was at the complete mercy of my own fear. Jerking and revolting in an unholy spasm, swallowing water, struggling hard to keep away from the fish. There could have been eels in there, or piranhas. I could be eaten, or attacked. In seconds I felt the drain of my energy, and, in the closest thing to a clear thought possible at the time, I felt sure I would die. Then, after opening my eyes for the briefest of moments, the panic stopped. I found peace.

A few inches from my face, was a medium-siz
ed fish. Her fins were golden brown, and the light from outside cast rainbows across her face. And the eyes. As huge as base-balls, in an honest shade of charcoal black. She just floated there, right in front of me. Not afraid, not intimidating, barely even curious. Just calm. It’s hard to be sure of course, with fish, but to me it seemed that she wore a smile. Just a small one, rising slightly at the sides. It was as I peered at this fish, the crowds of people above me, shouting and screaming in equal part worry and excitement, that I realised I had nothing to fear. Nothing. Not from fish, or from the world, or from anything else until the day I died. She spoke to me, that fish. Not literally of course, that would be horrific, but in another way. She spoke to my soul, in just a whisper. “Sam”, she said, “It doesn’t mean a thing”. Beneath that water, with hair and clothes beyond repair, and people above ready to shout at me perhaps forever, I looked that little fish in straight in the eyes, and I gave a nod. With that she turned, with effortless grace, and swam out of sight, waving me good-bye with her tail. The people at the centre pulled me out of course, and the teachers began asking me why I jumped in the pool. I had nothing to say though.

The next day I returned to the centre, this time alone, desperate to meet once more with my old pal. I never jumped into the pool, it was impossible - too many of the centres employees remembered me from the day before and kept a close eye on my every move. I didn’t want to be banned from the tank altogether. However, I did find a spot by the floor of the tank, with a solid glass window allowing visitors to peer into the depths of the water. It was here that I would sit, waiting to see her again. I sat there every day, of every week, for the remaining year.

I never saw my brown fish again, until many weeks later. I arrived late one day, an
d some of the attendants were scooping fish out of the tank with a giant net, dropping them into bags. They let me take a look, since I was a regular by now and knew my name. Inside their net, with her eyes closed and her body scabbed and unclean, lay my fish. They told me she had began to deteriorate with old age. They said the other fish probably began picking at her body, before she died.



- Right, well, that’s still not particularly useful is it? Vaguely moving perhaps, to some people, but not useful to anyone. Not at all.

- Oh. Well. What would be useful then?

- Well that’s obvious! I mean, y’know. Something about where to buy them.

- Pet-shop.

- Ok, ok – how to look after them then.

- Provide spacious tank, clean regularly, don’t over-crowd and feed with fish-food according to packet details.

- Right fine! Just do another one of your sucky stories then, see if I care…



When I was eighteen, I moved into my own place for the first time. Sharing a three-bedroom flat with my old friend Luke and an artist from out-of-town, who insisted we called him Indigo and requested egg-white when we asked if he wanted a coffee. One kitchen, small, and one toilet, broken. Ah, but I was in heaven. Complete freedom. No more hiding bongs and hash-pipes in my closet – let’s have them sitting proudly beside my bed. No more restrictions on music volume, meal-times, no more washing rules… freedom to be as much as an incompetent and lazy human-being as I so wished. On the rare occasion when I managed to convince a girl to sleep over, there was no sneaking out before nine, and no embarrassing excuses in the morning - only a victorious lie-in and ten minutes exchanging notes with the others. I painted my room as black as the thoughts in my head, filled it with lava lamps and candles, then found I was lacking something. So
mething with style. Something with class. Something trippy. Man.

Something fishy. A fish-tank. Tropical fish. And so it was arranged.

Standing half-way up my wall, between my television and my CD player, twelve fish of varying colours and sizes swam in a tacky world of fake palm trees and ceramic castles. It was the dope. Although I didn’t name them all, I feed them and cleaned their tank with all the dedication and obligation of a parent, making sure my fish never wanted for a thing. My favourite fish, since having a favourite is fairly unavoidable, was a small fellow I named Eric. Eric, my favourite fish. Even though everyone else who looked considered him bland, in comparison, and quite ugly, all considered, it wasn’t like that to me. Eric had a pebble-dash coat of subtle dark-blues and greys. He wasn’t particularly big, or particularly small, but still he stood out from the others. He had peculiar swimming patterns. He zigzagged. He zigzagged left to right every time he swam, and he kept low, right at the bottom. Eric was interesting, if you took half a second to watch, Eric was special, and he was my favourite. All the others seemed garish, and would swim up close to grab the food and show to you their dazzling colours and shades. Eric didn’t care for any of that at all.

The fish remained in my room for as long as I did, just as happy and content. They were entertainment, though in only the most honourable fashion possible. We simply watched them, my friends and I. Sometimes to laugh, and collectively observe their various adventures and peculiar actions with the bowl, then sometimes quietly, privately, without a word spoken to each other all night. Either way, they were hypnotising. Watching the fish was like watching a mini-world. We sat outside the rat-race, instead of in it. From something so simple, came pleasures so deep. Though it didn’t last. Indigo left our flat one ni
ght in a frightful rage, arguing loudly with his girlfriend – an incident which we over-heard in silence, within my bedroom, too afraid to walk outside or speak-up. We heard them exclaim their mutual disgust and desire to terminate the relationship, then we heard Her leave loudly and Him stomp upstairs, apparently to pack his things. We heard swearing, we heard phone-calls, and we heard the calling of our names. It seemed Indigo was leaving. He told us he was to return to France, to move back with his parents. He told us we were animals, and he hated the pit in which we lived anyway, and that he regretted the day he landed upon our ugly shores. Then he left, tripping on the stairs as he did, landing on his back beneath bags of roughly packed painting equipment. Our laughter soon faded though – myself and Luke could not pay the rent alone. Within the month, having failed to replace Indigo, we were forced to admit defeat. Luke would return to his parents, and I would do the same.

And it was on that day, as we packed our stuff with heavy hearts and left for home, that Eric died. It was the journey that did it. Twelve miles, packed tightly in the back of my Mini. We checked at the second-from-last service station, just to see if everything was ok, and at first glance it was – the bright fish still swam keenly at the top of the tank, penetrating the water with the same fluent strokes as they did back in the flat. When I looked closer though, towards the bottom, there lay Eric, perfectly still, with his mouth open and his tail still flinching softly. Oh, but if only he hadn’t zigzagged. If only he’d done the same as the other fish, and fought his way to the food. Right there, in the middle of the gas-station, I fell to my knees and cried. After a while, someone from inside came out to ask if I was ok. I just cried some more.




- It’s been over 2000 words now Sam, and it’s 3:20 in
the morning. Chances are people haven’t read this far anyway.

- I know.

- Time to give it a rest then? I mean I know you wanted to do something special what with it being your 100th opinion and all, but I really think you’ve bleed the subject dry.

- Think it’ll get locked?

- Excuse me?

- The opinion. Think it’ll be locked?

- Who the fluck cares. Besides, if it is, then it’ll teach you a valuable lesson.

- Which is?

- No one wants to hear your fish stories. Now finish up already.



As has been mentioned, this opinion is my 100th, and today does indeed mark an entire year for me at Dooyoo. To you, precious reader, I know this means little. To me, a little more. Dooyoo lets me be try to be the person I think I would like me to be if I were you. Dooyoo lets me say the things to the world that, if I tried to speak out-loud, would crumble beneath my verbal inadequacies and short-comings. I would stumble, I would stutter, I would lisp. My voice, however feeble, is stronger on this tiny website then it will ever be in the reality that is my humble life. For that, for a year, for the hundredth time, I am truly grateful. Thank you, and take care. Oh, and keep scrolling for the DVD extras, if you’re interested.












DELETED INTROS:

#1 (this was dropped because it alienated of other areas of audience)

So I’m thinking – what do tree-houses, playstation memory cards, foam machines and Cheju Island all have in common? Quite simply – none of them are as good as fish. I would like to take this moment to thank Keith and Jilly for their suggestions, all of which were good, just as I say - not as good as fish. Sorry guys.

The thing about fish is….


#2 (this was dropped through not being very good)

Call it fate,
but chance is a funny thing, am I right? Chance can win you a million pound. Chance can bring you love, and spiritual well-being. Chance can impale you on an electric fence and have birds pull at your eye-lids. My experience of chance is somewhat less exciting, to you anyway, and certainly would not make it as a feature in a woman’s magazine (unless I made up a sub-plot of bad husbandry), though I am rather fond of it. My 100th Dooyoo opinion was due around the same time as my one year anniversary since joining that site. Nope, I didn’t plan it – not because I’m not sad enough (I am – though save that sympathy vote for when I need it later), but because I’m not alert enough. I didn’t notice till last week, and that’s the truth.

Anyway, the thing about fish is….


HIALLRIOUS DELETED TITLES:

There’s Something Fishy Going On
A Fish Called Peakly
Window To My Sole: Part 100
Op & Chips
My Opinion On Fish
100 Fishmations
Fillet Op Fish
The Old Man & The Opinion
The Old Man & The Fish
The Old Man & The Fish Opinion
Fishing For Very Usefuls
A Time & Plaice



That’s it, hope you enjoyed what ever bits you read.

- P

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