Goddammit, I knew I shouldn't have said anything

Back in the day, I was all about making posts about my fish tank, and all it ever ended up being was a horrifying chronicle of guppy-death. So I shut up about it, and things went well for a year or so. But I just had to open my damn mouth, and things went goddamn haywire in there. For starters, I had to learn that my old heater was broken and stuck in the "on" position, meaning that if I used it, it would fry the fish, so it had to be unplugged. It had to be unplugged on the first cold night of the year. So overnight, the temperature drops from my normal 80 degrees to around 72, which is a really, really bad thing to happen to tropical fish. The resulting stress caused a shitty outbreak of columnaris in there that covered the tiger barbs in white fuzzy crap and just absolutely destroyed the rubber-lipped plecostomus in about 24 hours. I'm not gonna go into gory details, but after I scooped him out to give him a seaman's funeral, I considered just throwing the damn net away and buying a new one. Anyway, two 25% water changes, thirty-five dollars for a new heater and about twenty-five dollars for medicine later, the three barbs are pretty much white stuff free, and both Darrells are acting more or less like normal, but Larry's acting really stressed out and sick. It's weird, because you'd think the biggest one of the three would get better fastest, but this is something that tok out an algae-eater almost insantly, which is usually something that takes a blowtorch to do, so this illness doesn't have to make sense. Anyway, four more days of dosing with Maracyn and six more of Melafix and Pimafix to go. Hopefully everything works out. In the meantime, R.I.P. Algae Crumpler.

Current Status

Haven't done this in like eight hundred years, so I figured I'd detail what's been going on in fish tank world. First, here's the ten-gallon I got in 2006, still going strong:


It's kind of a shameful thing right now, as I had a mysterious plant die-off a while back that spooked the shit out of the fish, so I had to put the plastic plants back in until things grow back to a decent size. The lily is still enormous and shooting up new leaves faster than the algae-eater can destroy them, and after he chewed the bulb off, it's starting to sprout out the beginnings of a whole damn new plant. But aside from the one in the front-left corner, all my various kinds of aponegetons that used to fill up the tank died back hard, with a few offshoots from the originals trying to make a comeback, and a couple tiny ones that have been there a while and probably won't ever hit any significant size. If all else fails, I'll just start gradually replacing the plastic plants with store-bought fully-grown ones. It's not as cool as growing your own from a bulb, but the plastic plants make me feel so dirty.

As for the actual fish, since the last mention of the tank, I think around the time ice storms forced me from my home, the betta I had in there died, possibly due to shitty tank maintenace and an overfeeding of those little freeze-dried worms that were all he'd eat. The rubber-lipped plecostomus (since christened Algae Crumpler) remains, which is crazy, seeing as how he's lasted two years after being thrown in an uncycled tank by a complete amateur who ended up sending countless guppies and mollies to their doom in unlivable water. Tap water, even. Now, completely cycled and free from ammonia and nitrites, I've got three tiger barbs in there, which in another case of me breaking my "oh man, I can't name a fish, because all they ever do is die" rule, have been named Larry, Darrell, and Darrell. There was a fourth, Darrell, but after a couple months, he got this really messed-up swim-bladder problem. If I had a forty, I'd pour it out for him. Anyway, tiger barbs are nippy little bastards, all into establishing a pecking order, where Larry, identifiable by bigger fins and a spot in addition to the usual stripes, is the clear leader of the pack. Every now and then, he gets in these little fishy roid-rages that leave Darrell running for his/her life while Darrell hides up in a lily pad. Of the other two, Darrell 1 is the other big one, who's fairly peaceful and may or may not be a lady, and Darrell 2 is the little one whose small-man complex makes him chase the other Darrell around occasionally and makes him usually be the first one to swim out in the open after the gravel-vacuum freaks them out and sends them to huddle in one corner. So these things have relatively well-developed personalities for animals with brains the size of a pin head.

Oh yeah, and I've also got this one now, a two-gallon:

Since she's awesome, my special lady-friend Sarah provided much of what you see here, like the two big plants, (and a third gigantic, awesome one that I accidentally snapped while moving stuff around, and it's finally fragment is that little tiny one on the bottom-right) the Buddha statue, and Picasso, the Betta you see swimming around in there. When we got him, he was this tiny little baby-sized thing with bleached-out, almost transparent fins, but now, he's fully crown, hella-colorful, and fucking pissed. He feels no pain and fears no man, and while the barbs run for the hills when I do stuff in their tank, he swims right up to my hand, and flares his gills like one of those desert lizards. He is the Charles Bronson of fish. He spends his time blowing those little bubble nests, challenging my finger to fights, and swimming around, which is something bullshit-artists will tell you that Bettas don't do.

Seriously, most of the crap they'll tell you about these things when they're trying to sell one to you is absolute, cruel, fish-murdering shit. They don't live in puddles in the wild; they live in damn rice paddies. They aren't stationary fish that love living in a goddamn pint of water, they swim the hell around, and in nature, they're in thousands of gallons. They need all the same shit a regular tropical fish needs, with a few differences. They don't need a huge tank or anything, (and depending on who you ask, putting them in a big tank can actually stress them) but I'd say they need at least a gallon, preferably between two and five. definitely not the little bowls and cups people always have them in. If the container is too small for a filter, it's too small for a Betta. And yes, unless you're good enough to remember to change out some water every day, they need to be kept at tropical-type temperatures, and they need a filter. Not a big ass powerful one, because it knocks them around, but one of those little air pump-driven Whisper ones works just fine, and if you know how to make a decent sponge filter, (I tried and failed, for the most part) that's even better. So if somebody tries to sell you a little fish bowl for a Betta, you should call them a son of a bitch, and if they try to sell you a "Betta vase," you should mercilessly beat the shit out of them. Fuck Betta vases. The plant's roots don't do shit to clean the water, and a Betta is a damn carnivore, so it can't live off the plant. The only reason a Betta lasts as long as it does in those is because it takes them a month to starve to death. So instead of buying a Betta vase, you might as well just buy the fish separately, get a couple little pieces of wood and a stapler, and just crucify the little sucker. It's basically the same thing as getting a fucking Betta vase. Fucking people.

But yeah, anyway, I sure hope the heater in there works.

Hard Times in the First World

So I was out and about a while ago, buying expensive heaters to keep the frigid Oklahoma winter from killing my Betta and getting more groceries than I intended to buy, when I decided to stop by Ross. If you didn't know what that is, it's one of those clothing stores where most of the stuff is somehow damaged or irregular, and costs like a fifth of what it's supposed to as a result. I didn't find anything I wanted there, as their male clothing seems to consist entirely of knockoff Affliction t-shirts, and it's bad enough looking like a walking advertisement, but even worse when you appear to be advertising winged skulls that birds have been crapping on.

So I made my way toward the exit, and that's when I saw a guy I totally didn't notice on the way in through the same door. First of all, it was strange, because it was the only time I've seen a bargain-type clothing store have a security guard posted a the exit. But it gets even stranger when the security guard in question has on combat boots, fatigues, and I swear to god, a damn beret. And standing there as he was, sternly looking forward with his arms clasped behind his back, I was hit by the revelation that this guy looked exactly like one of Public Enemy's security guards.

It then hit me just how difficult things have gotten economically, when someone at least somewhat tangentially responsible for "Fight the Power" and "Don't Believe the Hype" could fall so low as having to pull guard duty at a place that specializes in slightly-irregular Perry Ellis socks. I wanted to say something, but I just kept on my way to the exit door, fighting the urge to throw up a Black Power fist or ask about how James Bomb was doing.

HEY SCORPION

NOT SO TOUGH NOW, ARE YA? NICE TRY, BITCH. NOW, YOU'RE DEAD. HA HA HA HA HA HA. EAT DUSTPAN, YOU FOOL.