#thetics

Have you ever seen a hagfish open its mouth? The hinge of its jaw never moves the direction I expect it to--nor are the teeth pointed the right direction. It's just got the one set, you see. Well, just the one jaw, more accurately, it's got plenty of rows of teeth. But the jaw (or tongue, as it's sometimes called?) is more a prickly grip than a serrated cutting edge; hagfish tie their limbless bodies into an overhand knot for leverage against the outside of the corpse so they can tear free a biteful of the rotting meat inside. It's kind of goofy, actually, because a hagfish absorbs much more nutrients through its skin than it does through its mouth, but it just likes the action of eating so dang much. Slimy seadogs worrying their whalehide bones. 

 Oh, I have shown you that video? 

Well, okay--but what about the whalefall the E/V Nautilus revisited last year? Look how svelte it got over the course. It hardly even resembles the animal anymore. Sure, a spine's a clear roadmap to what a critter's supposed to be, but a whale head is mostly tasty cartilage and blubber so what's left of the skull won't help you much, and look: all the ribs've fallen over. It's just a line at the bottom of the ocean now, a hangout stop for the local crabs and isopods, lightly fuzzy with boneworms (osedax--lovely things, mostly nested inside the bone to eat the collagen, but if you pluck the red feather free you'll see a bustle of organs like a lady's ballgown). 

This time last year it was covered in octopi and grenadier fish & all sorts from all over--hey, good eats is good eats, even a deer will eat what it hunts if by some miracle it manages to catch anything; only the top predators like orcas get to be picky, eating only a whale's tongue and leaving the rest to the abyss. But now that the gristle's been licked clean, even the sleeper sharks have moved on, and those drowsy couch surfers only move as much as they have to, to maintain momentum towards the next floormeat shindig.

What do you usually do when the party starts to die down? To be honest, sometimes I like those moments better than the night's peak. Cleaning up plates and cups with the host, reeling in cables and returning tables and chairs to their more practical positions, and finding places for the snacks left over (a host eager to rehome a lightly-noshed party platter is a godsend for my chronically empty fridge). Conversations would move from shouting across couches to lingering in doorways, on porches, leaning against the trunk of a car with my arms crossed against the cold. Maybe it's gauche to reminisce on such things right now, with the Before feeling just as hazy and palpable as the After. But the closing door made those chats possible, the driving need to have a good time replaced by tidying rituals and seeing-to's as the night drawing to an end. 

Whalefalls are busy places for months and months, a year-round party with no locks on the doors. It's rough stuff, feeling jealous of a couple crabs kicking up sand on their way into the dark.