Season's Eatings
from The Shark Shack
I live in a house called The Shark Shack. Sharks of various sizes swim through the household. Sanford, the Junkyard Shark, swims on our front porch; on the walls of our bathroom you’ll see watercolors of Great White sharks engaging in a variety of natural tasks like brushing their teeth and taking a bath. A vintage original JAWS movie-theatre poster greets people in the hall bath, while in the hall itself Bruce the Shark grins toothily with the Sydney Opera House in the background on a multiply-autographed Finding Nemo theater promo poster. A four-inch-long whale shark made of cast bronze swims along the kitchen windowsill. Shark Boy and his surround of thought bubbles and word salad oversee the doorway to the yard. A wee solar-powered dancing shark on a plant shelf in my office boogies its little tail off every sunny afternoon. A bucktoothed derpy shark painted on a palm frond floats over the hall closet.
There are many other monsters that live here at The Shark Shack as well. We have a gallery of beloved monsters in our bedroom: a chupacabra ponders its next dinner, an inverted witch’s hat piloted by a black cat is carried aloft hot-air-balloon style by a cadre of red-eyed bats. There’s a looming glorious goddess with hearts caught in her bloody wings whose name is Oh Darling! There are vampires among the regulars slouched at the bar in the painting on one wall of the guest room.
A painting of a grumpy little goblinish guy named Mr. Grumbles guards our front door. Our shower curtain sports a writhing tentacle-filled tangle of sea monsters in a print that recalls renaissance map illustrations. A gigantic pink octopus named Michael Jackson wears a wooden crown and waves tentacles menacingly from above our dining table, a bit of newsprint integrated into the background of his painting announcing that he is wrecking Atlanta. In my office I am overseen by Agatha, a handknitted anglerfish with massive teeth, and next to the laundry machines a mighty luchador wrenches the head of a corrupt bureaucrat in shirt and tie.
The sharks, however, outnumber all the rest.
My spouse and I, you see, have always agreed that the real monsters aren’t usually the ones that get labeled that way. All of the worst monsters either of us have ever encountered have been two-legged and have spoken in complete sentences, sometimes using phrases like “this is for your own good” and “what’s the matter, why don’t you trust me?”
Sharks, as we remind visitors to our local beach that ask us if “there are sharks out there” in the Atlantic Ocean, do not infest waters: they live there. We’re the ones that are crashing the pool party, not them. That’s where they live and that’s where they hunt.
Sharks kill because they must eat. On the whole they much prefer to go after nice easy prey like injured fish or slow old seals than to go to all the effort of hunting down something fast or more prone to put up a fight. Predator animals that expend disproportionate amounts of energy to get themselves fed incur a debt that can’t be sustained for long.
Sharks are sometimes scavengers, as virtually any wild meat-eater can be, but they exploit nothing more than someone else’s discards in the process. Sharks do not hunt for sport and they do not kill more than they need. Unlike their charismatic and therefore ridiculously and relentlessly sugar-coated fellow marine megafauna the bottlenose dolphin, sharks don’t gang-rape or sexually harass females of their species (dolphins also sometimes get sexually aggro with humans), commit infanticide, or routinely murder other animals and their young apparently just because, and not for food. All that sounds much more like the kind of things humans get up to, honestly.
What a monster is depends a whole lot on what you’ve been convinced to believe is monstrous.
Our houseful of monsters reminds us every day that not everything we get told is monstrous actually is, and some of the things we’re told are monstrous are actually both blameless and vulnerable. They remind us to consider who’s telling us what and why, and to bear in mind that some people will vilify and even go so far as to try to kill things (and people) mostly on the basis of the fact that they don’t know much about them but they heard they were bad.
Our largest household monster is a massive resin sculpture of a Great White shark head that currently hangs over the kitchen sink. It used to hang over our bed so we could sleep under its watchful gaze. In this house the big shark prefers to hang out in the main room, which definitely improves our celebration of the annual ritual known as the Eating of the Mall Santa.
At some point in December, we awaken to the glad spectacle of our shark friend with a Santa hat dangling from its pearly whites, sometimes with some other bit of Mall Santa frippery caught in there too. When we see it we know that once again the elemental powers of sharp-toothed chompification have overcome the dreary fake jollity of compulsory capitalism and the spiritual miasma of thousands of photos of freaked-out children being forced to wear itchy new party clothes to sit on the piss-damp velour knee of some stranger they know in their bones is absolutely not really Santa.
“Season’s Eatings!” we say. “Merry Sharkmas!”
Cheered by the reminder of the true meaning of the midwinter festive season — which is and always has been about finding some joy and play and light and hope in the dark and cold of the year — we look around us at our Shark Shack and its company of sharks and monsters and smile at each other.
As we say here at The Shark Shack: Chomp chomp, motherfucker! May you swim strong and true and may there always be clean water, space to explore, and enough to eat. May you hold your beloved monsters close and may you always be able to keep the true monsters far from your door. Here’s to you and the light you bring not only to the dark of the year, but throughout all of it.
A few bonus marine critters from our Fishmas tree…
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Love how what started as a compilation of shark whimsey built to a reminder that critters can display more of what makes us human, as the cliche has it, than some of those “humans who ain’t human.” (John Prine sure nailed that one.)
Wish you hadn’t said that about dolphins, though. Another long-cherished misconception bites the dust.
I suppose next you’ll be telling us that there is no Santa Claus.
Or, for that matter, truth, justice, and the American way.
Oh, Hanne, you are such a gift ♡