Thank god for the fishies. wasn't it in tim burton's big fish, that grand tale of a bunch of circusfolk and a crooked house and a dying man, wasn't it there where the story is told that, that... a goldfish grows corresponding to the size of the space where it is swimmin'? so that really a goldfish who grows in big spaces grows big? and what a great story! but isn't it a bit of a cliche' though, that small spaces limit growth, in every sense, and viceversa? but what do we mean by growth?

i once met a boy who had grown over two metres tall, he had, inside his mama's 2 bedroom apartment, squashed flat between the seventh and the ninth floor of a building squeezed between two others in a suburb barely made to fit within the complex tetris network of the city. but how he grew, this boy. his mental age never surpassed that of a child, however, whereas his emotive age had reached disproportionate heights by the time he turned twentyfive. so he would show me scribbles he had made with broken bits of crayon and such things, of dwarfs with carrot heads and flowers in imagined fields, and fish with pulsating aortas instead of fins, giggling with such a blank face you'd think he actually had no idea of the contents of his drawings. he was a happy one, this boy. his heart had in fact grown directly proportionate to his limbs, so that one day it actually surpassed the given space within the thoracic cavity, got stuck between two ribs, and stopped beating.

and then of course there is the story of the boatman who, having decided to continue his existence by feeding on the algae from the belly of his boat, had actually shrunk to the proportions of a small prawn. the boatman had, however, been able to figure out the origins of the universe and the mechanisms inherent in the theory some would refer to as quantum, all in rudimentary terms, of course, but more or less the same concepts. all alone, in the middle of the sea. he eventually threw himself off the stern and into the gaping mouth of a patagonian toothfish. the common end of all genius-like creatures, some would say.

the point of this story is that fishies are good, regardless of size. especially crumbed and oven baked.