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.