When I was young, we lived with some creative people in a very old house, who liked to do things like collect rocks and pile them up on the counters, and paint paintings that were sometimes excellent and sometimes deeply embarrassing, and occasionally get involved in something more complicated, such as saltwater aquariums.
We kids were not, to my recollection, involved with the actual maintenance of the aquarium. Our job was more literary. One Christmas, we made a song:
“Oh come, all ye faithful,
Living in a fishbowl,
Oh come ye, oh come ye to our a-quar-ium,
Come and behold him,
Born the king of seahorses
Oh come let us behold him
Oh come let us behold him,
Oh come let us behold him, Zorse, The Lord.”
Then there was the tubeworm meme. One of the critters in the tank lived in a long thin calcified shell she made herself, with her body and delicate tendrils spread out searching the currents, which were of course minimal, and awaiting whatever tubeworms await, other than dinner. Signs of other tubeworms, perhaps. We failed on that count as well.
Some of us, young and old, took it upon ourselves to torture the tubeworm. We’d get a finger up close, gradually creep up…and finally touch her, upon which she’d whip herself back into her tube. Then we’d wait for her to come out again.
This turned into an actual meme for we humans in that karass. We’d call each other out for tubeworming, meaning stone cold withdrawal upon the receipt of triggering stimuli.
Funny the things one remembers. That tubeworm meme has lasted for me from well before I knew what a meme was.
Someone I knew for several decades and used to trust,once accused me of always taking a powder when the going got tough. Tubeworm.
Tubeworms gonna tubeworm.
There’s fingers out there. We tubeworms do what we gotta do.
mro
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