The Sea Monkey Diaries: An unauthorized manual for the care and feeding of your inner child
I killed them all.
I shook out my maroon dorm room rug (a perfunctory pre-Freshman year purchase that I really didn’t like) and knocked the home of my Sea Monkeys to the floor. My first, and only Sea Monkeys (gasping?) as they’re absorbed into my unwanted rug. They’d been growing. You could see them ‘swimming’ around, maybe 3/4” or a full inch. Living kitsch. Do you remember Sea Monkeys? I’m buying more Sea Monkeys, making up for a transgression almost 25 years past.
Johnson-Smith was the fine purveyor of the novel and exotic: chattering teeth, whoopee cushions, x-ray specs, get rich quick schemes, ancient coins, space ice-cream, space pens, space alien exposés. The ads for Johnson Smith on the back of comic books and within the pages of Boys Life lured me, promising fun, amusement, novelty and the adulation of friends and family. I’m still searching for these unrequited promises. The potential of learning magic, ventriloquism, getting rich (quick) and growing a real, live Venus fly-trap was the kind of future I saw for myself. The Sea Monkey advertisement, often a quarter or half-page, immediately garnered your attention with its 4 color glory. Shipping was usually 6–8 weeks. That’s almost two months. No way would that be tolerated today. I wanted to build a hovercraft with a vacuum cleaner motor and float down the street, over the heads of my adoring friends and neighbors. I wanted to hatch a smiling family of Sea Monkeys, grow my own friends and teach them tricks. This desire to command living creatures lies at the grubby, snotty center of every child’s wish to possess a pet. All children wish to dominate, and exercise some sort of master/servant relation, don’t they? The child is in charge. While playing toys are bade to do things. The desire to own a pet has little to do with caring for another. Nope. You want to control a lesser, smaller being by exercising a sovereignty you do not know…but believe is there for the asking (or taking). I don’t think I ever had any friends with Sea Monkeys. I tried growing them in college. All went well until that fateful night when I dashed these unsuspecting brine shrimp into the fibers of my cheap Kmart carpet in a fit of shrimp-icide.
Does “growing up” reconcile an unrealized promise with reality and the ensuing tension between satisfaction and disappointment? We were supposed to decorate Easter Eggs with our neighbor, Lynn. She was my sister’s age, five years older then me. Maybe older. I was 4. Lynn was coming over to babysit us (she must’ve been older) and we were going to decorate eggs. I was very-excited. I’d only decorated eggs maybe once before in my life, and I was a big fan of Easter (as in the bunny. Jesus? A little less. He didn’t bring you candy). Our parents are gone, and we’re going to decorate Easter Eggs when they get back. As soon as they return, Lynn has to leave. It feels a little sudden. I ask about the Easter eggs, and Lynn promises to decorate them with us soon. No Easter eggs for me. I think this was my earliest memory of the sour deflation of feeling let down, disappointed, you know? That space or mood of unmet expectations, tinged with the sorrow of a game promised, but not played. Later that day, mom got a call from JCPenny’s. Lynn was caught using my parent’s credit card to buy clothes. She had stolen the card from my mom’s purse, and went shopping instead of egg decorating. She came by to apologize several days later. I never forgave her.
Sea Monkeys signify eternal hope. Forget Jesus. I believed in Sea Monkeys, resurrected by 8–10 year-olds around the world for almost 60 years. Perhaps as ant-farms went off-trend Sea Monkeys occupied that same juvenile colonial mentality of domination. Ownership when you’re under the age of 10 is a big deal. Ownership when you’re an adult is a big deal. Ownership is a big deal. I wanted to control other living beings that didn’t need to be walked. I wanted to be self-reliant in my dominion of others. Sea Monkeys were my dreams of Walden, my cabin, my practice in romantic realism, and enlightenment. And attachment. I was looking for attachment.
I bet I can get a family of Sea Monkeys from Michael’s Arts and Crafts. This national chain for scrapbooking and year round holiday decor traffics in zombie brine shrimp. Are brine shrimp krill? Do whales eat Sea Monkeys? (EDIT: I stopped by a MIchael’s today. They didn’t have Sea Monkeys).
What else did I order in the mail? Mostly wishes. I hoarded my catalogs of dreams in my desk drawer (same place where I once kept a mouse. Briefly.) I took that mouse to church. It doesn’t get more Norman Rockwell than a choir boy with a mouse crawling out of the neck of his choir robe. Fortunately the sopranos didn’t see it. That could’ve ended the service. Or at least provided a rather odd evangelical interjection rarely witnessed in an Anglican Church.
I kept my well-perused copy of Johnson-Smith alongside multiple catalogs and inserts from the Supreme Magic Company. I also had a hunting catalog (once you made it on those mailing lists, you got all sorts of non sequiturs in your PO Box.) I was more intrigued by the paintball offerings, duck calls, and camping utensils (though I’m sure I wanted to find a use for a spray can of deer scent). Alongside the catalogs were my lists, my desires, my ultimate pre-pubescent fantasies waiting to by fulfilled by Johnson-Smith and the Supreme Magic Co.
Where am I going to put my Sea Monkeys? My wife will undoubtedly have several opinions (and rightfully so.) The aquarium (a term I use loosely) that comes with the deluxe Sea Monkeys Kit is not the most decorous object. Molded, clear acrylic tank with either red or blue cap and base. It’s mostly water in a a flattened elliptical box. Steph (my spouse and partner-in-crime) is actually quite patient in accommodating my taste in home decor. I have a preserved baby shark in my closet; theatre tiki-masks that parrot the masks of comedy and tragedy; chattering teeth; eyeball cuff links; and assorted postcards and posters adorning the walls. I’ve created a Sideshow in my closet, sublimating the Sideshow I want to work into hidden decor.
