Consider the lobster (NaNo, Day 23) November 23, 2005
After work tonight, I stopped at the grocery store to pick up a case of tonic water, my fizzy beverage of choice. As I walked past the seafood area, I chanced to look upon the herd (group? school? frat house?) of lobster in the tank.
They know they’re doomed. That’s why they’re there, with those elastics around their claws. Most creatures who are doomed (but don’t know their hour yet) are usually either passive with acceptance or panicky with fear. Not the lobster. Oh, no.
There were three or four in the corner engaged in what can only be described as some kind of tag-team wrestling action gone crazy. Since they couldn’t use their claws to pinch off other bits of their opponent, they were using them to bash the living hell out of each other. The rules of engagement (only two persons in the ring at a time; tag the team member when you wanted to be relieved) had been tossed aside in a massive free-for-all. If the lobsters weren’t engaged in the main scuffle, they were contributing to one of the many side events that were also taking place.
There was one lobster who was sitting apart from all the action, near the public side of the tank. He wasn’t fighting, but he didn’t look any less fierce or pissed off than the others. Sitting there, his powerful claws rendered useless by those thick elastic bands, his antennae were twitching as if to say, “I know what’s coming, and I’m not going quietly. If I have to, I’m taking one or two of you mofo’s with me.”
I can respect that, which is part of the reason I don’t eat lobster. (The other is that they taste yucky.)
On to other things….
It is bitterly cold out there tonight. We’re supposed to be getting a snow storm, but I think it’s too cold to actually snow. We’ll see. Either way, I’m not walking again tonight because it’s so so so cold, and I’m such a delicate flower, that I might freeze something if I do.
Plus, the laundry is about to grow legs and smother me in my sleep, so I need to do something about that.
(Oh, and the story is coming. I have really good days followed by really bad days. On Monday, I got about 2000 words written, and then yesterday I had a migrane, so I got less than 100 words done. Tonight, I’m feeling wordy, but I have to constantly interrupt myself to fetch the laundry from one place to another.)
When I go to Red Lobster I enjoy watchin’ em in the big tank…like walkin’ the Green Mile, ya know?
P.S.: One of the reasons they band their claws is because they’re cannibals! They will eat other lobsters if hungry enough!!
lobster is yucky…lobster is yucky….what you blasphemer…you heretic…may the great neptune skewer you with his trident and feed your writhing corpse to the hungrey haord of scavenging lobsters…
(some of my family are lobster fishermen..kinda bias..)
when we were kids out on the boat we used to get the ” sqrawd” undersize lobsters and have lobster gladiator fights on the cabin of the boat…your lobster would fight until he lost a claw or just stopped moving…then time for another one…I can remember as a kid lamenting that we had to have lobster again for supper…i would pray for fried balony…
actually i was just thinking…who ever thought yeah I think I ll eat one of those…yeah that thing looks like some big sea cockroach..yeah maybe I ll eat it raw..who was the first to eat a lobster wish I was there..
Mike - ew! Nasty little buggers, aren’t they?
Tommyboy - so’s my uncle - but that doesn’t make me like them any more! But the Gladiator-style fights sound kind of fun
I don’t mind the taste of lobster; it’s the texture I find kind of icky. But since I can’t eat crab anymore there’s a campaign afoot to get me to eat lobster. I’m still resisting.