Story of the Coelacanth

Why Coelacanth? If I am a fish, which I am for reasons I won't go into here, coelacanth is the appropriate species. I could be said to live in a cave. In fact, my previous, virtual (imaginary) Internet identity was the Cyberhermit, whose website, if it had existed, would have been known as the Cave of the Cyberhermit. In the offline world, I even live in a dark house with low ceilings and some amount of encrustation.

The coelacanth, latimeria chalumnae, is older than the dinosaurs, and supposedly one of the last of the critters in the evolutionary progression to live in the primordial sea before somebody crept up onto land during the late Devouring period. We hang out in our caves during the day, and only come out at night, when we eat unwary squid and octopus squirting along the seabed in the very deep ocean. We are unique animals, not to be mistaken for any other fish. Even the pattern of whitish spots on our blue scales, which camouflages us against the sponges on the walls of our deep blue caves, varies with the individual.

Somebody else is blogging under the name Coelacanth, but not on Blogspot. What the hell, it's a big Internet.

There are two cats in my cave, but they have easy access to high-quality cat food, and they're not going to bother hunting down a bony fish who's much bigger than they are. Lazy beasts. They only chase what runs from them.

This cave is not as cool as it should be. Global warming is a fact. Hang around minding your own business for 450 million years, and somebody comes along and fucks everything up.