For my dad's birthday a couple of years ago i got him some Koi fish, he'd just built a pond in the garden...carved it out, sunk it in and heaved a great big boulder/stone into the middle of it.....into which he had painstakingly drilled a hole into so he could pump water through it and out of the top. It's actually a bit more than a pond really, he calls it the pool of two hearts, as there is another one, up slightly higher that feeds into the bottom pool with the big stone in it via a waterfall, so they're connected and don't exist happily without each other. It represents him and my mum which is seriously cute and kinda romantic to the max.
Anyway the other day i was thinking about when Sissy Spacek throws that big old fish in to the vegetable patch in badlands and its kinda tragic and it got me thinking about the ones i got my dad for his birthday...there was one in particular called ghost he was pure white and very beautiful. He grew like you wouldn't believe.... it got to where he was so big it was unnerving...you know when a fish gets to a certain size and somewhere in the back of your mind you know that you can't just flush them down the toilet sending them back to their mother ocean like all the goldfish you ever owned in your life......well it kinda gets you a bit nervous like you may actually have to comtemplate digging it a grave, burying it...eating it.... or offering it to the cat.
I was watching him this one day and he was suckering all the green stuff off the big boulder...loudly it was a big epic sucking sound in the world when fish are meant to be quiet...the rock had become a great big slimey algae popsicle. It was kinda cool watching him be a valid animal and not just a fish cos now not only was he massive and significant but he was noisy too.
In the winter on 2010 our lake froze over and was so solid we could all walk on it, my whole family and tehre are 7 of us...all except my aunty angela she walked around the lake and thought we were all mad. Of course the pond froze over too....i don't know if we all forgot or it just didn't occur to us ...as the weather was extreme and not usual but the fish died that christmas we didn't actually know until the thaw came. It was pretty heartbreaking and i remember thinking oh god were they all just hanging out under there like you do when you get a snow day off school and everyone just has a laugh and goes sledging and builds snowmen..etc..so i presume they were all just under havin a bit of a gas you know just waiting for the ice to melt and then it didnt.
I like to think they all just fainted from lack of oxygen and by the time they were dead they were not even aware that they had died you know..... hmmmm the reality i think was probably less idylic than that.
It was like the time my mom was minding my brothers love birds (he'd been given them by a girlfriend on valentines day (i thought this was a rad present but they were quite annoying actually) my mum would pop them out on the picnic table in the garden for fresh air in the day time, anyway this one time she was late home from some event and the weather took a funny turn and temperature plummetted and by the time she got home they were dead....little sticky feet up. flat out. back down...gone from the world. My mum was all 'oohhhh god love them.... they died together so romantic' i was thinking.... hmmmm yeah they froze to death to be honest.....i'm thinking not so romantic unless its televised... no broken hearts in that cage.
It got me to thinking about leo and kate in titanic when he freezes to death and she lets him go and he floats down into the deep murky depth of the ocean and old winslet the survivor holds it together floating on her door or piece of furniture or whatever it was.. i mean i always thought she coulda just budged up and let old leo squeeze on but she didnt.......to be fair i bawled so hard at this scene my face changed shape.
yeah freezing to death...never pretty...unless youre like a wooly mammoth or something.
