Windy Verbal Superfluity in Praise of a Fish and Life
(A Facebook Reply)

Emily II (the Emily after Emily I, but before Emily III, and long before Jimmy Shimmers) was a lovely goldfish that lived in a bowl on our kitchen table. She'd been a carnival fish in early life, but when the ping-pong ball of fortune chanced to fall into her bowl one day, she became a Nicholson.

She was a joy filled fish who dashed around her bowl anytime someone walked past the table. She had a gift for living life to the utmost. She sucked the marrow from the bones of the corpus of mundane existence. She was Nietzche's Over-Fish. She was Plato's ideal of a goldfish, of which, it is said, all corporeal fish are but pale reflections. Her lineaments where such as to humble sculptors and architects.

Over the passing months, as she reveled in the abundant joy of admittedly confined yet seemingly boundary-less life, there on our kitchen table, her tail grew substantially more diaphanous and extremely full, owing more in appearance to the wing of an arch angel than that of the fins of any mere carnival fish to come before her. She was a marvel of abundant living and an inspiration to embrace each day with unsullied passion.

Sadly, as with many souls possessed of a lion's heart and an eagle's lofty vision, she was fated to be tendered a life which was lived twice as brightly as the norm, only to yield to a final accounting that was half as long.

In the throes of her joy and rapture one fell evening, after those of us to whom the normal rigors of temporal existence require the solace and rejuvenation of nature's second course, sleep, and had temporarily sought sweet morphean oblivion to shuffle off the effects of random and often brutal reality, Emily II had, in contrast,set about a dervish dance of fishy terpsichor-y that would constitute the summation and all too immediate conclusion of a Roman Candle life lived amidst the dull and smoldering glow of punk that had surrounded her.

What the performance entailed could only be speculated upon the next morning by the prodigious residue of the splash and the sated and somehow wise visual echo of Emily II's deeply dead eye. She lay there on the table, consumed by the fires which had been the essence of her life, as one who had now passed into the ranks achieved by few, save Isadora Duncan, Duse', and Najinsky. She had, quite simply, lept for sheer " joie de vivre" out of the milieu of her own life into the ether of the outer world. She jumped out of her bowl.

It was I who had the misfortune to discover her, and having not yet ushered my daughter toward knowledge of the mysterious existential abyss of mortality, scooped this embodiment of ichthyan transcendence onto the burial bier of a nearby spatula and hurried with her little body, devoid of its divine essence to the bathroom.

Pausing at the Porcelain Altar of the Void, I reflected on the symbol-logy of what was about to occur. I rationalized that this end was as good as any, was it not? Her life, as all lives, was a temporal thing, and to fetishize the vessel after it had been rendered void of its living essence was actually to glorify that which was, finally, but the trappings of the sacred light of life.

But, remembrance of the horrible Charybdian sucking that attends the plunge of the chrome lever of elimination ceased my philosophical self-equivocation. Action must be taken, and taken decisively. My child would shortly waken, and she must not see me full in the flush, so to speak, of this act's commission.

Then, to my brain it came, and I feel certain, not wholly birthed in conception by my own methods of invention. It was, I am convinced, an extension conveyed to me by the still lingering life force of Emily II, and it would serve to both confirm and conclude the shape and scope of that life.

I proceeded to our plant corner in the sunny portion of our living room and using a handy spoon left nearby after the last night's repast of Hamburger Helper, fashioned a tomb suitable for the repose of a fish of such boundless vitality and fathomless appreciation for the gifts to be realized only in the fields of time and space. She now lives on in the strong stem and defiant leaves of a towering rubber plant.

A living poem to the power of the force of life fully lived.