[Popped up today on Facebook from 1988]

Aquarium is almost completely restocked and lush with plants. Still looking for a few otocinclus (impossible to find lately) because they devour algae like no other. And also three or four freaky spooky see through glass catfish for when we drop acid and become one with the pesciverse. Aquariums are Fish TV, no commercials and Trump free. If only I could see where the trio of ghost shrimp slipped off to. You can see right though them, just innards and legs and beady black eyes.

We’ve had a continuous aquarium nearly as long as we’ve been married, since 1983 or so. We were married in 1980. Sometime back in the ’80’s the dreaded fish disease ich struck and all our fish died but one, a black mollie, who got desperately sick but survived. She had the tank to herself for maybe a year when we decided to introduce some pretty but inexpensive fish. They were neon tetras, I think, and they thrived, so we restocked our tank around that one mollie. It lived for years. Thirty years later we still have a thriving fish tank. The filter wheel is probably twenty five years old. We’ve never had another epidemic and the fish live forever. Unless, of course, the danios go berserk and eat everyone. But they seem past that now, the Charlie Manson danio died after psychotically attacking a plant for days, and the other danios are back to their hyper wiggly mindless selves. All seems well. Weird how a marriage and a fish tank go together for decade after decade, somehow inseparable.