I’m in this Japanese restaurant, where I meet my father for dinner once a month, and we’re sitting in this two person booth waiting on our food, drinking our miso soup, and I notice for the first time (I’m pretty unobservant) this small aquarium against the wall filled with three large goldfish and bottomed with tiny blue pebbles. The goldfish are all staring at me and my father. Which disturbed me. As it rightly should. Obviously this aquarium was too small for these goldfish. And worse I couldn’t help but empathize with those fish, felt somewhat ill at ease eating right in front of them. Here I was going on about my life drinking my soup, eating my edamame beans, and there they were imprisoned. What I’m saying is I wanted to free them.

At one point during the meal this little girl in a purple princess dress gets up from a nearby booth and goes up to the fish tank and starts tapping on it. And oh man do the goldfish love it, they all crowd around her finger, making those little sucking motions with their mouths, like, Hello, Hello, Hello. What is this? Food? Probably food. But not food. But still, maybe food? Food? And she just goes on tapping and giggling while the goldfish go out of their minds trying to nibble at her finger. And then an old japanese waitress in a kimono shuffles up to us with with our unagi and maguro nigiri and I’m too busy mixing soy sauce with wasabi to waste time thinking about jailbreaking three goldfish with a glass of water and releasing them into a pond in a nearby city park.

But I want to, you know? I want to be a person who saves goldfish from restaurant aquariums. Although I know goldfish have a tendency to be a little destructive in certain environments. What if that pond leads to a stream and the goldfish start mating and suddenly there’s a whole natural disaster with the goldfish outcompeting other species, endangering them. I don’t want to be the cause of that. But what if the pond is just a pond and there is no stream leading out from it. Then my three new goldfish friends take over the pond and became Lords of the Pond and live there for half a century, growing to direwolf size. Or they are quickly eaten. And I mean of course direwolf sized goldfish sound amazing, but every other option is so terrible. Maybe it’s better to let them languish.