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Two giant sharks were aimed straight at us, their mouths wide open.
"Hide the Starbursts," I said to my wife, even though the sharks were plastic. Beyond the sharks were life-size replicas of a blue whale and its newborn calf, hanging from the ceiling on sturdy wires. To the left of us were fish and sea mammals of all shapes and sizes. Some were stuffed animals; some were made of rubber. One of them wore a T-shirt that said, "Aquarium of the Pacific." The ads for the aquarium had been right, there were all kinds of sea creatures there. We had tickets for a 3D movie about the ocean, so we went to see that first. In the movie we discovered another variety of marine life, the computer animated type (subspecies: computergraphicus). They were pseudo-fish, kind of like what you get at Long John Silvers. By the time we left the theater, I was hungry (not literally) for some real fish. Fortunately, the Aquarium of the Pacific had plenty. There were purple fish, blue fish, one fish, two fish. There were fish that matched every color of the rainbow of Starbursts that my wife had in her purse. Sharron had bought the Starbursts at Vons that morning and had been feeding them to be intermittently. I found myself in some sort of behaviorist experiment where my actions were dictated by positive reinforcement. I don't know why I never thought to take the whole bag from her and just run. We are the only animals, the 3D film had told us, that have the capacity to implement significant change in our world. Maybe you are, I thought. One of the most interesting exhibits at the Aquarium of the Pacific is, oddly enough, the display of jellyfish. Jellyfish are not to be confused, the sign said, with peanut butter fish, which are an endangered species (of the genus weeatemchunky). In the wild, it is never a good idea to disguise yourself as something that tastes good. This is why there aren't any insects that look like pears (source: Encyclopedia Britannica). Also at the aquarium was a lorikeet exhibit, which is kind of weird because lorikeets are birds. Apparently somebody at the aquarium got confused about what the word "aquarium" actually means and they ordered some birds by mistake. They don't even pretend to be embarrassed about it, but frankly, I think it's a big screw up. Halfway through the day, we left the aquarium to have lunch across the street at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. I couldn't bear to eat any fish having seen so many cute ones swimming around and after learning about all the vicious predators they have to face, so instead I had a lorikeet sandwich. Okay... I had a cheeseburger. Jeez. Our ticket to the aquarium included a ride on a boat on which we got a tour of the Long Beach Harbor. After lunch we went on the tour and got an opportunity to learn about local marine life (as well as a little bit about some of the guys in the Navy). As we sat on the bow of the boat, my wife pointed out a woman who had a sour expression on her face (subspecies: alwayspissedoffidus). We had seen her at a couple different places throughout the aquarium. "She hasn't cracked a smile all day," my wife observed. "You know what she needs?" I asked. "What?" "Starbursts." Sharron nodded and fed me one. I wagged my tail. Back at the aquarium, we finished looking at the exhibits. In one, there was a huge round glass tank where sardines swam in a circle, looking like a perpetual cyclone of tin foil. A young girl in front of us asked her father why the fish just swam around in circles. "Probably for the same reason I do," he said. Oddly, after we had left the aquarium, that was the main image I carried around with me. Monday morning, as I rounded a curve on the freeway interchange, I pictured the fish going around in circles. I wondered if our species really has the ability to change the world, or if we've been conditioned by so many factors that, like our cousins in the sea, we are just swimming, swimming, swimming. |
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