Fish Friday

Didn't want to; had to: the doctors say that if I don't start eating fish,
my heart is going to sludge up and slam shut. And that will
seriously impinge on my ability to watch football.

Greg:

I freakin' ate a goddamn fish this week. It wigged me out more than just a little. And it was just plain bad. Wait - let me start at the beginning.

So I got all this bullshit going on where I'm getting old (apparently - I don't feel old), and my shit is coming unwired, like my blood pressure is going up and my cholesterol is freaking out and my sleep is all screwed up and I'm all "what the hell - I ate right and exercised so this wouldn't happen" and they're all "it's hereditary" and I'm all "just fuck my fuckin' genes already the bastards". You know what I'm saying? So now for the third time a doctor has said to me, "you gotta eat some fish or this bullshit will keep happening", and the first two times I was all "up your arse, fish killer!" But then - well, if three people tell you that you're a horse, you prolly oughtta saddle up.

So after eight years of strict vegetarianism (excepting that one time I swallowed a leaf hopper by accident while I was hiking in the Olympics), I have resigned myself to eating fish once a week. The Fish Friday thing hasn't killed any Catholics - none that I know of anyway. As far as I know, they all die of guilt. The thought of eating a dead animal still freaks me out, which I guess means that I'm not so much "vegetarian" as "meat phobic". But as my friend Jim "LiveWrong" Bergman pointed out, it's much easier to practice compassion and loving kindness when you're alive. Bein's I'm a grumpy old shit who labors desperately hour by hour to hold down the lid on a broiling magma geyser of hatred, I can't say that I entirely agree with that. But I do enjoy my life quite a bit and would like it to continue, so eat fish I must.

Loath to do anything on time, I launched my new Fish Friday tradition on Saturday at Ivar's Salmon House on north Lake Union. It's a swell little place, kind of a reproduction of a Salish long house. There's a dock on one side of the restaurant, too. You can bridle your dinghy and hang out on the deck while watching yacht-loads of University of Washington frat boys mend the injuries of rush week with earnest applications of alcohol. It's almost like watching the grunions run if all the grunions were male. I digress. Jump cut: I ordered a fillet of Sockeye; they served me a charred lug sole. (As in "boot" and not "Dover", I assume? -Ed.) So to make a truly horrible pun, my first fish experience went anything but swimmingly. (I warned you, did I not?) And just to plant the flag of irony on the whole thing, their vegetarian plate was incredible. No, seriously, they do some kind of magic to grilled vegetables that I haven't encountered anywhere else.

Oh oh oh - AND - here's just another discovery that I've made recently because of this whole Fish Friday thing: fish is really goddamn expensive. Meat in general is really goddamn expensive but fish in particular. How do you meat eaters do it? I'm going to have to get a night job at Starbucks just to afford one salmon fillet per week. Any more than that and I'm going to have to take out a third mortgage or go down to the river and strangle the fish myself. On second thought, I'm not so sure this whole new fish-eating thing is going to prolong my life at all. I could be crushed to death under a stack of debt.

Cheers, and send fish.

-Thaddeus