Fish Tank Jumpers

Some people get their ideas for stories and stuff from their dreams, and they're all like, "ooh, you should write all your dreams down in a journal! yay!" and junk.

I hate those people.

I just woke up from a dream where I was cleaning a fish tank all night long.

Yah, I was baby-sitting somebody else's house, and their stupid pet fish were a nightmare.

At first they kept jumping out of the tank, the bigger fish were lifting the lid to the tank with their noses, and they were letting all the littler fish jump out.

And I was running around, trying to pick their gross little squishy bodies up off the floor without mashing 'em and ploppin' 'em back in the tank, hopefully before they died, hoping I didn't miss any.

And you know how that is, when you plop a fish back in the water, and he doesn't come back to life, and you go "aw."

Well I musta gone "aw" like thirty times.

Don't get me wrong, about half of 'em came back to life.

After a while I got fed to hell up with going "aw," and I told the fish that I didn't care if they died, I was done playing Extreme Fish Sports with 'em, and I went and watched TV in the other room.

But the pet dog was looking at me out there, so I started feeling guilty, y'know, and I went back into the fish tank room and started picking up the fish tank jumpers again.

When they finally slowed down, I checked out the tank, and these fish had torn the thing to shit, all the fake plants were floating around in a big hairball, loose from their mooring, a couple of fish, including one of those beautiful japanese fighting fish, had impaled themselves on a wire sticking out of these weird little fake white bushes, there was half-eaten corpses, tons of floaters, it was a mess.

So I started pulling shit out of the tank and fixing the thing up, and that's how I ended up spending my whole night cleaning somebody else's fish tank in dreamland.

I'm fricking exhausted, its more relaxing over here in the land of the waking where the only pets I have are the shit that's growing in my fridge.