I’ve been trying to reconcile my faith with my childishness, and I’ve been getting tired of always thinking if I deserve to think such a nice thought, and I’ve been thinking about how Americans argue less about things than each others’ right to argue about certain things. I’m getting tired of competing for moral high ground, and worrying if my acknowledgement of my being tired of this means that I’ve given up some moral high ground. the result of this is that I’m trying to figure out why people name their fish without offending anybody, fish included.
this is what I’ve got so far:
1) people are weak; what can’t be explained by weakness can be attributed to stupidity.
1.1) that’s not always the same thing, but the two overlap, hence the appropriateness of stupidity being a corrolary and not a separate number on this list.
applying 1 to why people name their fish, we see that weak people give in to the dearth of human love by transferring their sedentary affections onto a pet, in this case a fish. they name this fish because it is then deemed more than a fish: it’s a fish with a name, a special fish, a fish they take care of.
the problem with this explanation, the “weak” explanation, is that a fish is a weak thing in itself. it doesn’t possess the strength needed to compensate for what the person lacks. or, there isn’t enough to do with a fish to prove that you’re really caring for it; there’s no substantial way to transfer your affections to it, other than feeding it and changing the water. you can’t pet it. you can’t take it on walks. unless you had a serious mental handicap, you would be laughed out of the building if you brought a fish to a veterinarian.
(that’s only slightly less fucked up than naming your fish, by the way.)
so here I am with my weakness, trying to transfer it onto my fish, and it can’t love me back. or I can’t know if my fish loves me back, because it can’t do a fucking thing other than wait in its bowl, forget it’s waiting, wait some more, eat and shit and then get replaced by another fish, upon whom I will place another name.
so you can’t name a fish because it can’t love you back. why, then, would you name it? the only reason I can think of, besides, “some people are just stupid,” is that it’s meant ironically. by naming your fish, you acknowledge the vacuum of the human heart. other people are like your fish, trapped in a small, dark bowl, things you can’t touch without harming. and you’re helpless to do anything with your own, other than feed it two flecks of food twice a day and wonder how it feels when you leave for work, what it thinks about when you turn the lights out, if it remembers you.
