Being a fisherman with an aquarium… is like…

You know what makes me sick?  You know what makes me so mad I just wanna try to sneak into Sea World with a peg leg… and a harpoon?  Yeah – that ought to freak out Shamu.

Yeah – my little boy, Earl Junior come home the other day from a high school fund-raiser… he got a plastic bag filled with water… and there’s gold-fish swimming around in there.   I says … ‘What you gonna do with the fish?’   He looks at the fish and he goes… I don’t know – keep it.

Now – at this point… I should have jumped up… snatched the bag out of his hands … run to the toilet… and saved myself a world of heart-ache.  But fact is – I don’t move as fast as I used to.  Cause my old lady come in there… before I moved an inch.

This is a woman that’s been wanting an aquarium since the day we got married.  They got an actual ‘guys building aquariums’ show on the TV – and she’s hooked on it.   She has been begging me for twenty-some years to buy her an aquarium.  I am personally opposed.  I think being a fisherman with an aquarium… is like being a hunter raising baby deer in the garage.  There’s just something fundamentally wrong with it.

Here’s the problem with having a aquarium.   Number one – you got to go to the aquarium store.  Who has ever gone into a aquarium store… took a good whiff and thought…. ‘man, I’d like that smell in my house.’  Plus – the people you will find at an aquarium store… are just a tad more creepy than the people you will find lined up at the methadone clinic.  It is not a hobby that attracts normal people.

Number two… that free goldfish you won with the ping-pong ball at the spring social… will end up costing over three hundred bucks – if you want to do it right.  An’ my old lady insists we want to do it right.  Yeah – if we ‘did it right’.. .Nemo would be swimming around the waste treatment plant right now.

Wake up, America!   I told my old lady… that fish dies – you owe me 300-bucks for this stupid aquarium.  He’s still alive.  Although I caught her twice last night – giving him mouth-to-mouth.    I’m Earl Pitts, American.   And Pitts Off.

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