Nearly everything about dolphins

I love nearly everything about dolphins. I love the way dolphins are rubbery and shiny, I love the way cartoony pictures of dolphins look on little girls’ binders, and I love the fact that dolphins are the only animals that have sex because it feels good. The only thing I don’t love about dolphins is that they somehow get themselves into cans of tuna. You know those cans of tuna you get at the grocery store? There’s dolphins in them.

At least that’s what Roger told me. Roger’s got piercings all over, but he’s cool. Roger’s a guy who works at a DVD rental place I go to a lot, and he told me what I told you about dolphins being in tuna cans. Or maybe he said something about how the way tuna fish meat was harvested or manufactured or whatever hurts dolphins somehow. I don’t understand the mechanics behind it, but then again, I don’t know anything about the way people get food from the ocean. I’ve never been to the ocean. I work at Pump-n-Zoom, a gas station in Phoenix. I eat most of my meals here. A lot of times I eat nachos and a lot of times I eat hot dogs, and a lot of times I just eat sunflower seeds and beef jerky. Here the food comes from truck drivers in little bags and in little boxes they bring us.

Of course my brain understands that meat comes from animals that are slaughtered, and my brain understands that most of those animals reside on farms, and so food mostly comes from farms. But I’ve never been to a farm. I work at Pump-n-Zoom. But Roger’s a nice guy, and I believe what he says about dolphins and tuna, and the ocean and farms.

One time while I was returning a DVD of Metallica in concert, I asked Roger what tuna looked like, because I had never seen pictures or movies of them before. He said “what?”

And I said, “I know what it looks like in the cans, all mashed up. But what does tuna look like when it’s alive?”

Roger said that tuna fish were maybe a foot or two long, and they were a dull gray, and they didn’t get much attention because they weren’t pretty or interesting, like dolphins are. But then he told me about these different cans of tuna you can buy that don’t hurt dolphins at all. He said they costed a little more, but if you bought it you knew that it wasn’t hurting a dolphin at all. After he said that I didn’t feel bad for eating tuna, as long as I bought the right can, as long as I could be sure that there wasn’t any dolphins in it.

I was happy when he told me that, because I like eating tuna fish sandwiches. And sometimes my grandma makes tuna-nuna casserole. She told me the recipe for that. It’s just a can of tuna, a bag of egg noodles, and a can of cream of mushroom soup, and then some lemon-pepper spices, and maybe some regular pepper.

After Roger told me all that I checked out a Godzilla movie where Godzilla is fighting a T-Rex on the cover.