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Starting when I was in Kindergarten I had a beautiful 100 gallon salt water aquarium in my room (maintained by my father, of course). We lived in Dumas (that hotbed of musical activity from which Joe King Carrasco emerged). I could read the paper, and did, often. We kept that tank spotless and had two very powerful diatom filters on it. I had great fish.

I had a gorgeous black ribbon eel who lived for I'm not kidding over 7 years. I had a panther grouper, huge fish, you might not throw him back if you caught him while fishing. I had an awesome Volitans lionfish. Volitans are the hardiest of the lionfish, though I always thought the Radiata and Antennata lions were more attractive.

The other fish I had for a very long time was a niger trigger. Oh, I had at different times a rainbow wrasse, blue face angel, percula clowns, a copper band butterfly, blue tang, horn shark, scooter blenny, red faced batfish, yellow tail tamarin, horned cowfish, and a bannerfish. This is from memory and it's been 10 to 20 years, so. But those others only lasted between one day (if destroyed by one of the boss fish) and a few months.

But those 4 (trigger, eel, grouper, lionfish) lasted for years. Survived a move. Survived disease. Survived one bastard of a mean ass angelfish. Tough fish. They ruled. They all got along with each other remarkably well. Not so any new fish we introduced. It's okay, they were good.

Especially the trigger. He was great. I learned the word "disembowel" at age 5 because of him. Cuz he used to piss my Dad off when he would disembowel a feeder goldfish within .33 seconds of said goldfish hitting the water. In a flash he bit out the stomach and left the rest to float at the top of the tank. Of course, this made the goldfish unpalatable to the rest of the predators in the tank.

You didn't play at sticking your fingers in the tank, either. The lion and grouper could easily inhale most of my small child finger, while the trigger could rip out a good size chunk of flesh. The lion was also heavily venomous. Okay the grouper when he'd become an adult was 10 inches long, the trigger about 8, with a mean mouth full of teeth.

Well, childhood memory.

Kim Szatkowski had always seemed kinda awkward (in a tantalizing way), reserved, pensive. Then after I had to stop interacting with her cuteness, we had to see La Farce de Maitre Pathelin for French class.

And guess who played Guillaume. Kim. My corneas dried up and blew away watching her. It was a metamorphosis. She was somebody else. She wasn't herself. She wasn't acting. She had become a 19th century 40ish male French clothier. And it was frightening to me. That was the last time I saw her.

Pickup trucks give a punishing, hurlinducing, "let's demonstrate the shock absorbers" ride that doesn't agree with me. Shin splints are a recurring repetitive motion injury causing pain while running and tenderness to the touch around the inside of the lower third of my lower legs. I have over 20 full size dinner plates. "When we skate on the thin ice of life, our safety is in our speed" --a famous transcendentalist. Bear in mind, general politeness is dying with this and the next generation. I don't know how to feel about that. In the Divine Comedy, Satan is munching on Judas. I see many parallels between William Wallace of Braveheart and Satan of Paradise Lost. Michael DeBakey, M.D., is a true American hero in every sense of the word. He has done more to make the world a better place than almost anyone else in recent consciousness. But you have to die of something. When I worked at a bookstore, I once got in trouble for drawing horns and a goatee on the face of Bill Gates on the cover of "The Plot to Get Bill Gates". The book's cover has multiple copies of Bill's face. I didn't do it. It came like that. One of the faces has horns. I almost STILL got in trouble. I want to hurt myself laughing.

Sadistic penal authorities place a blind convict and a deaf-mute convict together in solitary confinement and the two men attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other.