R.I.P Cocksucker

So…..T and I are trying to be financially responsible. We are able to just make our monthly bills on my salary and his loan money if we never leave the house except for work, school and vet visits. In years past we have gotten each other some fabulous Christmas presents, but this year we decided to skip Christmas for many reasons (including financial ones). That meant there was no Sony Playstation, no Cricut scrapbooking dream machine, no Garmin, no DVD recorder, and no new computer. Instead, we used credit card points to get gift cards in order to buy Christmas presents for everybody. I have also stopped looking at the thousands of catalogs that come in the mail because browsing through them results in seeing things I want and this leads to rationalization and then to spending money. Thus, when I get the catalogs they go directly into the recycling pile. A couple weeks before Christmas, however, T tells me there is something he has “got to show me” in one of the catalogs. I tell him not to, I tell him it will lead to bad things, I beg him not to show me, I run away as he chases me with the catalog….but he insists. An R2D2 aquarium! NO WAY!! Now I had to have it. But it cost $129.00! So I went on-line and to my great surprise I was able to get a $100 gift card for the store! We were so excited we decided this would be our Christmas present to each other. We contemplated our fabulous new fish habitat....thinking about having a couple of gold fish….or perhaps tetras as was described in the catalog. The possibilities seemed endless. I remembered the hypnotizing and relaxing bliss I experienced sleeping next to my brother and sister-in-laws aquarium and I was overcome with the Festivus spirit. YES! Yes, we would have an R2D2 fish tank for Christmas! It would be our very own Christmas miracle! Or not. We received R2D2 about a week before Christmas and we put him together and filled him with filtered water to let it become room temperature. On Christmas Eve we went to the pet store and spoke at length with the fish lady. I told the her we were preparing to populate a 2 gallon tank with a filter but no heater. This led her to pronounce that the only fish we would be able to keep in the bowels of R2D2 would be a betta (Siamese fighting fish). This was somewhat of a bummer because I wanted more than one fish and bettas will fight each other to the death. None-the-less, we merrily went about our business picking out a betta. There was a whole wall of betta fish in all different shapes and colors. I found one that was a beautiful iridescent blue color with long pretty fins when T realized that all the different kinds of bettas had various prices. And….of course……the betta I had picked out was the most expensive kind, a $14.00 half-moon betta. I realize this doesn’t seem like a particularly large amount of money but you can get a betta for 0.99 cents at the local Evil-Mart. We moved towards the gravel section, when what to our wandering eyes should appear, the very same R2D2 aquarium, only on sale for $60.00 I fear. This did not bode well. My Jedi sense was tingling. But we soldiered on and picked up gravel and some plants that said “for betta fish”, a net and some food. We got home and put everything together correctly….rinsing the gravel and plants and letting the fish sit on counter for the afternoon. When we finally put the fish into his new home in the belly of R2D2 he didn’t seem to do much. Clearly, he was not nearly as excited as we were. We deiced to wait to name him until we see some personality from our new pet. We soon found out, however, that the R2D2 aquarium is a total piece of shit. It leaks, the head didn't fit right, the filter system seemed ass-backwards. Really, it is just a big piece of shit. Hence, I imagine, the reason it was on sale for $60 at the pet store. Hoping to hold on to our Christmas miracle, we decided to take the head of R2D2 off and have a headless R2D2 fish tank. Kind of like we were using our scrap R2D2 unit to house a fish or something clever like that. And after all, betta are supposed to breathe from the top of the tank, so a headless R2 seemed like a good fit. Over the next several days I began to worry because the fish wasn’t really swimming around at all. All he seemed to do was hang out in the corner at the top of the tank and he never ate when we fed him. After about a week we went back to the pet store and inquired about the normal activity of betta fish and decided to try a different kind of food and some water conditioner. Also during this time, T and I were watching Deadwood and decided to name the fish Cocksucker….the favorite word of Al Swearengen. A few days later we noticed Cocksucker laying at the bottom of the tank. And….a couple days after that he was dead. That $14.00 cocksucker was gone. So now we have the piece of shit headless R2D2 aquarium we paid a ridiculous amount for, a dead $14.00 cocksucker, the gravel, the plants, TWO types of food, and water conditioner. We are debating getting cocksucker part deux but haven’t come to a decision. I just don’t know if my heart can take another cocksucker slowly dying in the belly of R2D2.