Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Habeas is corpus

I've apparently killed my fishie and am very sad. I really loved this fish. He lived in my office and I felt guilty every weekend when I left Habeas by himself with no one to talk to him or feed him, and apologized every Monday morning. I rescued him, since people are always stuffing bettas in these tiny, sad bowls, which I think is terrible; so he got a 3 gallon tank with live plants and was very happy. However, yesterday I thought the tank needed to be cleaned and I changed out the water and washed the algae and fish poop out of the gravel and apparently, he liked it better dirty because he was dead this morning. We buried him in a paperclip box outside my window and I cried in the parking lot.

This leads me to philosophize a bit about some of the fucked up people I see every day. The system punishes them and occasionally tries to rehabilitate them but maybe if they cleaned up too much, they'd go belly up. Maybe some people just need to be in a little crap to be OK. Who are we to say? Maybe the laws of nature apply to us too. For instance, a catfish wants to eat gunk off the bottom of the pond. It's what makes him big and fat and whiskery. Maybe some people are just made to have a continually revoked license, a pissed off family, a familiarity with the jail guards, a lawyer budget, and favorite games to play in a cell. They provide jobs for lawyers and judges and district attorneys and jail guards and legislators and police and probation officers and clerks of court and probably a bunch of people I don't even know about. Maybe some people just don't need the water changed.

Sigh. Well, guess I'll mourn the fish for a couple of days and find another, perhaps luckier, inhabitant for this lonely looking tank, and let him get dirty if he wants to. In the meantime, more power to the catfish people who pay for my office so I can give a dirty fishie a home.

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