On the Couch Beneath the Waves
By ice rivers
Tue, 19 May 2020
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Back in January, when the Roku aquarium screensaver flashed on our teevee, we barely noticed it. At the beginning of February, we left it on for a couple of seconds. By the end of February, we would watch it for a half minute or so and found it cool and relaxing without paying much attention to it other than a momentary groove. By the end of March, we'd sometimes go a minute or so and notice how often the movements of the fish in the aquarium were in synch with whatever music we were playing at the time. One time Yellow Submarine came on and we went the distance with the song. By the end of April, Lynn had picked out a favorite "fish" and we began to wonder about its state of mind and whether or not it was even a fish. It hid itself in a rock, apparently stay in place and never got within social distancing of any of the other "fish" although it seemed to be yelling at them from inside its hiding place. We did some research and came up with the idea that the "fish" in quarantine was not a "fish" at all but rather an eel.
Since we ourselves are in quarantine in our personalized submarines (all our frineds are out there too) and often end up yelling at one another while staying in place, we began to identify with the eel. We discovered that when the screensaver is on display it slowly moves to the left at which time the "eel" moves off the screen entirely. Then the screen moves to the right and before long, the "eel" is at the very center of the image and is impossible to ignore. He momentarily becomes the star of the show and seems to be at his most righteously irritable yelling at the morons who are swimming in each others...."you think you're so beautiful...so free....so goddamned graceful....having a ball out there." And the other fishes swim right past and above the eel trying their best to ignore his grouchy debbiedownerism until the screen itself starts to once again slowly move to the left and the eel momentarily disappears and everything seems right as gaze through our video porthole into the virtual aquarium as the band begins to play.
Sometimes it feels like nothing is real and we watch the eel for fifteen minutes in Mid-May we enjoy it a little more every day
every day.
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