Here are two things I know: pets are trouble, and people are idiots.

First with the pets. I admit, I already have one. She is a cat, and aside from the logistics involved in not letting her outside of the house, and that time she peeled my spouse's face back like Hannibal the Cannibal did to that EMT in Silence of the Lambs, she is a doll. Really, I don't mind when she drinks out of my nightstand water glass at 2:00 a.m., after jumping on my head. It's what cats do.

But I draw the line at Mo. She's it. No more pets for me. Except that somehow, as of today, I have acquired a goldfish who probably has a terminal fish disease like Ick, who lives in a desktop aquarium with a really loud tank filter about which the spouse has already complained.

What happened?

Bringing us to point # 2: people are idiots. Specifically, me.  

It's one month ago, and I'm talking with a landscaper. You see, out here in the suburbs, land of people who wake up at 6 am to pressure wash their driveways for 12 hour shifts as a leisure activity, it's best not to let your yard lapse to the point of being That Neighbor, the one with the dead shrubs and lawn infested with necrotic ring spot. If this happens, you just might be visited by flocks of tight lipped women in pedal pushers, carrying clipboards full of signed petitions concerning the imminent removal of you, your shrubs, or both.

"Let's tear out the peony," says the landscaper, the one with the beautiful pink flowers the size of softballs, and swap in a 200 lb ceramic container, with some type of sea plants in it, "just for a little interest."

"What about mosquitoes?" I ask. I see them now: the epileptically wriggling larvae in our swimming pool when I was a child, immune to toxic, 80's era concentrations of acid and chlorine.

"Oh," he says, "Throw a couple of feeder fish in there. They'll eat em right up."

So it begins. Food? De-chlor? Fish nets to sift out the corpses? Memories surface from the fish tanks of my youth, of that time we came home late from the state fair. There they were, flopping and gasping on that heinous, gold-spotted 70's tile floor, angel fish and guppies, and neon tetras, a D-Day of sea-life casualties, because the caulk on the aquarium somehow gave way. I was already cried out from letting go of the balloon dad bought me, plus I was nauseated from too much cotton candy, and life was closing in with all of its small, sad surprises, and then this: the fish tank, turned out and suffocating, right before bed.

"You want me to put fish in there?"

"Oh yeah," he said. "Don't even need to feed 'em. They'll eat bugs." This is where un-stupid people would demand some kind of desert shrub or rock formation, something ignorable.

"Sounds good," I said. And the fish wept.

Days later, I am standing in front of a large feeder fish tank. "I'll take three. Give me an orange one," I said to the fish store guy, a weedy post adolescent who probably liked to hot box his Datsun after work.

"Um," he said. "You want them all orange?" Now, I am a reasonable person. There were maybe four orange ones, in a vast tankload of the mud colored kind, which makes sense, since these things are basically popcorn for barracudas.

"No," I said. "Just one. And kid? Go to college." Ok, I didn't say that last part, but someone needs to. It's his last shot to meet the kind of loose, irreverent young women that will haunt his mid life crisis.

It took the kid five minutes to catch an orange one. It kept just ahead of his net, darting across lanes of mud-colored comrades, but the kid persevered, thank god for the food chain. He chucked the orange one into a bag, along with a couple of the muds. I took them home then, like a box of kittens, to their doom.

Mud number one lasted three weeks before I found him in a state of decay in the gritty depths of the container. His companions officiously swam around him, like the rabbits in Watership Down, when one of them fell prey to the traps. I fished him out with an old pasta strainer, vowing to refresh the water more often than never. He didn't starve to death, at least: I had been sneaking the fish occasional fish food supplements to their alleged bug meals.

I bailed and refilled the water, let it dechlorinate, and tried it again. And yet, mud number two was gone within the week, showing signs of some type of scale disease. Fish are prey to many disgusting disorders; I will decline to speculate if one of them felled this pathetic mud, since ultimately, I was the official cause of death. This left No name #3, the gold one, and there was only one probably fruitless, and regrettably high-maintenance thing I could do to try and save his life: bring him indoors.

And so one $23 starter tank and a sad plastic plant later, NN#3 floats woefully in the limited horizons of his desktop dwelling, probably checking his watch for the coming hour of his fate, even though I have crash-coursed on nitrogen cycling, hole-in-the-head disease, and other fish chemistry topics in honor of his departed comrades.

Which returns us to the original problem: who will eat the mosquitoes?

Send mail to mail@tiny-dog.com.