Fish Resort

A Reuters news item today reports that the city of Chicago has installed a choice environment for beauty-starved fish of the thoroughly urbanized Chicago River. Like a modern zoo or aquarium (with a night house) the public can view and photograph the fish as they sample choice vegetation introduced to the resort.

Bravo: with a BUT.

I make the best of having been born in 1938 that I can by celebrating our times as interesting. Whether we’re on our way to a better society (or a better species) or whether we’re in a Last Days anteroom to hell, our times are interesting.
I don’t exactly have a choice; but if I did, and chose selfishly -- that is, if I chose to please myself, to like and approve my society, my species, I’d choose to live free: that is, in nature: before kleptocracy, before civilization. If I were lucky, I’d get to breed before I ran into a pissed-off lion, or a hungry stronger group. As it is, born into coerced FREEDOM, among critters who, if they understand a word of what I say, don’t have the balls to admit it, I join Ivan Illich in hating every new gimmick to manage us, to put everything in charge of moron experts, to replace woods with gardens and nature with a hospital: ever more expensive and destructive. Now even "wild" animals can’t survive without the interference of a hospital of some sort: animal social workers.

Nevertheless, under the circumstances, a nice modern zoo (or aquarium) with a nice nighthouse (or underwater viewing air-tunnel) is better than total urbanization (and extinction) for everything.

And I love fish. I love to eat them. I love to catch them. (I especially love that most of them are smaller than me: and I catch them, not the other way around.) I love to watch fish. I’ve had aquariums much of my life, if not currently: but then I’m in the water with them nearly every day: wading with my rod. Most of all I love fish because they’re wild: less and less, but still. I love to tussle with a creature that will kill itself rather than be captured. (Fish form their own schools: not a one state-fiated.) (Though once a bass has been released, it never again fights all out like the first time. And I doubt that any farm-raised fish will ever fight like a native.)

(Now me in contrast, if I were ever redrafted for church, for school, for the army, I’d fight like hell: which I didn’t the first time.) (Same if someone tried to trick me into another marriage!)