Something Smells Like Tuna

We dated for six months before I couldn't take the smell any longer

If I lived in Miami, I probably wouldn’t be writing this right now. I suppose if fish were a way of life, I would be used to it by now. The fact is – I hate almost all seafood. It’s nasty. And I hate it for several reasons:

1) Seafood is the only meat that looks relatively the same whether it is alive or dead. You kill a cow, skin it, remove all the organs and put them in a pile for hot dogs and shit and then you chop up the rest into various meat products and ship it off to market. Whether it‘s a t-bone, sirloin or rump roast – none of it looks like a dead cow. Hell, one even has to use their imagination a little bit when it comes to identifying where all the prominent parts of the chicken used to be after it’s been cooked and tossed on the table.

I went to an all-you-care-to-eat (we’ll talk about the all-you-care-to-eat versus the all-you-can-eat-marketing ploy at some later date) seafood restaurant last week with some friends and ordered up the all-you-are-to-eat rock shrimp.  Shrimp is actually the only type of seafood that I actually like to eat – if it’s been skinned, de-veined, chilled and served with that red stuff. But this stuff was ripped out of the ocean, thrown into a giant pan of salt water, boiled and then tossed on a plate in front of me, with its little legs, shell and face intact. Imagine ordering a steak and having someone explain to you that before you could dip it in ketchup and eat it; you needed to rip its face and legs off with a tiny silver novelty fork and discard it onto your used salad plate.

Because of the all-you-care-to-eat-status, there was a plate of shrimp-skin piled as high as our noses by the end of the night. It looked like we had been eating locusts or something all night. Disgusting.

2) Seafood is the only meat that smells the same whether it is presented to you on a solid gold platter with parsley-garnish and lemon or tripped over, lying there bloated and rotting, while you try to walk on the beach. It all smells like that gamey, fishy nastiness to me. I seriously wonder how people tell if the fish has gone bad. Does it start smelling like flowers or something? Even if I manage to get some fish into my mouth, there’s a good chance that I’ll get stabbed in the cheek by one of those tiny bones. I take it as a message from God: If an animal is filled with tiny splinters, He probably doesn’t want you to eat it.

3) If you are going to eat seafood, prepare to eat some poop. Seafood is the only meat that people don’t consider it rude to serve to other people with the poopchute still intact…and full of poop. A good portion of the time, if a diner attempts to remove this veiny chute, the thing explodes and poop flows all over the shrimp. I’ve got bile welling up in the back of my throat just thinking about it. To be honest, I’m not even sure that its really poop, but the fact that mymind tells me so is enough to make me want to harf right now.

4) I went to prom one year and was broke as shit, but I really liked the girl (still do, actually) and wanted to impress her. I took her to the Metz (or something like that, the point is that it was really fancy and insanely expensive) restaurant in Des Moines. You couldn’t get out of that place without spending well over $100, but I was feeling optimistic. And what, dear readers, do you imagine that she ordered? That’s right…seafood…lobster…bitch. The whole night ended up costing me something like $300. When it was all over and time for the payoff she decided that we would go to the ultra right-wing church sponsored after-prom party, complete with the asshole that used to announce cartoons on our local FOX affiliate masquerading as a standup comedian. When I finally did get a little ‘attention’, she smelled like fish (and that was her face…). Even though I was really, really attracted to this girl and had
been waiting for this moment forever, I couldn’t pull the trigger due to the profound smell of fish.

Damn I hate seafood.