The Sadness of Man, or Why We Will End Ourselves
The man who didn't understand anything killed it. He killed it until it was a symbol of the species with sadness and endings or nothing. We are smart in ways to win, and it will end us. And it was a symbol of the wrong reason to do something. Harvesting a wild steelhead, even legally, is a morally disgusting thing. Taking the fish for glory and shallow pride is rotten. And lying as a cop-out is a bloody, festering thing.
You're fish, Peter Harrison, was a steelhead. It was a wild and clean archetype of the steelhead, brawling with disarming beauty. It carried more environmental significance than you do, considering all species equal, your fish was several thousand times more significant than you. Your choice to harvest the fish makes you a hated man whose generation ought to have past with the extinction of California's beautiful rivers. Jim Kerr should have drowned you on your free cross-river boat-ride. He an accepting man and if others had seen you, it would have been a different type of free trip.
And this is why we are pulling our needs out from under us. Humans are good at taking something until they can't take anymore and must then take something else. It's the greed gene. Maybe its nature's way of letting a species destroy itself in a systematic way. Peter, you have saddened fisherman. Your decision to harvest a world record wild steelhead, for only the purpose of misguided immortalization was wrong. We, the fisherman, pray together on rivers and oceans and in the cold and rain of the west that you are left empty. May every cent you garner from your catch bring you self-destruction, malady and guilt. The guilt that flows fast and freely through your veins. The inescapable type of guilt that obscures the taste of your food and makes you change positions on the couch until you resign yourself to being uncomfortable. May you remember how the fish looked after it was dead, the beautiful eye. The eye of golds, and greens with and blackness deep like every ending put together to make true black.
We are left with only the realization that nothing can bring the fish back, but ask you to please leave now. The program is nearly ruined, and you are worsening it.
The Joker king holds his greed.