The Tilapia Did It, Officer

or
Of Bicycling Drummers and Intellectual Discontent


Today’s Tracks: Zombie--The Cranberries and
Another Saturday Night--Sam Cooke


Every so often, even the most oblivious of us are given to make a blinding insight.
Only then do we truly appreciate the sentiment so aptly expressed by one Mr. Elmer Fudd upon making acquaintance with one of Newton's more disagreeable laws:

"Ignorance is bliss."

I'll level with you. It wasn't actually the Tilapia that caused all the trouble. As far as I know, he was quite profoundly dead at the time. In fact, it may very well be that he was long since eaten by the night in question. Therefore, it's only just that I lay the blame elsewhere, namely squarely on the shoulders of the cycling fishmonger (who one might, I think, fairly call a peddler), as, I've no doubt, the aforementioned slanderized fish would have done.
The evening began, as so many do, quite innocently. I sat on my couch late one evening, eating a sandwhich. It was not in any way a remarkable night, unless the remark be some sort of comment on the staggering dearth of anything at all happening. Nor was it a particularly good sandwich, save in the sense that it might well have rescued me from starvation, if I'd not eaten in the course of the previous days, which of course I had. So, both a sandwich and an evening on which to consume it, and neither of them particularly pleasant in any way. In fact, I only mention either for the purpose of illustrating the essential dullness which had pervaded my being at this time.
As is my habit at such moments, I switched on the television. Not out of any real hope of finding a satisfying program to watch, exactly. More out of habit, and the overwhelming feeling that, no matter how dejected or apathetic I may have been feeling about the night, the meal, or anything else, matters could only conceivably be exacerbated by having to endure it all in a dark room whilst staring at a blank television. My faithful set, once more earning its rock-solid reputation, failed utterly to provide any viewing option more engrossing than a standard laundry rinse cycle. But it was one of those nights. I'm sure--as substantiated by the phenomenal sales of products such as motorized fishbait and lighted boxer shorts--that you've all had more than a few of them in your lives. After a couple of hours, you would really watch your washing machine. So I assumed my dauntless channel-surfer guise and waded into the murky waters of off-primetime television. For those of you keeping score, this was far from my first mistake that day, but good call nonetheless.
After skimming through every available station approximately thirteen times, I stumbled upon some sort of documentary program--perhaps it was National Geographic--about life in one of those small, sweltering, rice-producing third world nations, whose precise name I don't recall at present. I'm certain this lapse of memory owes a great deal to my dog and her pet alligator, but that's a tale for another time. Anyway, as I had few other calls on my time that evening, I decided to watch for a while. The premise, as I came to understand it, was, basically, that life as a rice farmer or his wife is insanely difficult. Factor in a bustling lot of children, uncertain climatology, and an omnipresent film crew, and things went downhill steadily. I sat through probably half an hour of exhaustive videography devoted to the fine art of watching futilely as crops failed to grow. Likewise, I watched as the farmer made structural repairs to his "home away from home", so that he and his wife could be dry and safe while practicing said art. In other words, I was rapidly approaching catatonic boredom. Then, without warning, he appeared, that grim harbinger of internal unrest:
The bicycling Tilapia salesman.
A small, nondescript man on a rusted two-wheeled relic of forgotten engineering, on which was strapped a box full of relatively recently deceased fish. I sat up and took notice. He approached the farmer's wife, whereupon they proceeded to traded a bit of small talk before getting seriously about the business of dickering.
Pointless nattering and haggling over fish.
And I could not tear my eys from the screen.
I hung on every word; that sun-scorched tableau became my world for a few moments.

I cannot explain the feeling I was left with when I returned to a slightly more sensate condition.
I was subjected to the spontaneous realization that, intellectually and socially, I had completely atrophied.
For a shot time, I was completely out of touch with reality. Completely mentally disarmed and utterly unmanned by the steady, numbing stream of pseudo-stimulus washing over me from the pretty glowing box.
I had abdicated that which we intellectuals like to perceive as the very essence of humanity; the one and only thing that truly separates us from the lower orders of life. And all so easily...

We are in danger, friends. It is slowly happening to us all.
Plus, though I don’t remember for certain, I believe it was on a Saturday night.
Now that’s sad.