I’m being bullied by a fish tank - The Boston Globe

I don't hate the fish. Not necessarily.

Let's get that on the record before we zoom in on me, in the role of "sitcom dad," seconds from leaving town for the holidays – 10 glorious days away from my son's fish tank – about to execute the other thing I had most been looking forward to: turning down the thermostat.

"What about the fish?" my wife exclaimed from the other room, just as my fingers joyfully reached for the down arrow. "Won't they get cold?"

I take it back. I do hate the fish.

It's hard to believe that it was just Oct. 19 when all this began, because I can't remember a time before a fish tank controlled my life. And there is no doubt that much of my bitterness stems from the fact that I had declared to my younger son, in my best "sitcom dad being serious" tone, that he could only get a fish tank for his 10th birthday if he promised to take care of it all by himself.

"I promise," young Jake Baker said, confirming he had not listened to a word I'd just said. All he could think about was fish, which is all he ever thinks about. Long ago, he declared that he is going to be a "professional bass fisherman" when he grows up, which is fine because I looked it up and it's a real thing and they make more money than print journalists.

For the first few days, the delusion held, and I managed to stay out of it. My parents took him to buy the tank and the 864 pieces of gear that come with it. My wife helped him fill it up and use all the water treatment chemicals with natural-sounding names like "Quick Start." And I stayed mostly quiet when he announced he was going out to get his first fish, and instead of grabbing a credit card and heading to PetSmart, he grabbed his casting net and headed toward a lake.

"That's not gonna work," I muttered as I returned to more important adult things, like looking at my phone and getting mad at people I'll never meet. "But it's not my problem."

Good one, dad.

By 3 a.m., there was a crying child in my bed, as an adorable little crappie floated at the surface of the tank. We consoled the child and made funeral arrangements for Cristiano Ronaldo — he had named the fish after his favorite soccer player — and as I looked over at my son, finally fading to sleep, I had one of those tender parenting moments where you say to yourself: Dammit.

Let's speed through the next couple of days. I became an expert on the quality of my town's tap water (it is apparently "hard," though it feels "wet" to me); I wowed my children with my skill with an aquarium siphon (after realizing it worked the same as a beer funnel); and I became the owner of 37 gallons of Market Basket spring water, along with some "healthy" bacteria.

When the tank was finally ready for Take 2, we headed out the door with a credit card toward PetSmart, as God intended. That's when the murders began.

Kylian Mbappe (continuing the soccer theme) died that first night, and Ronaldo II looked suspiciously full. Back to PetSmart we went for Mbappe II and Zlatan, and then to Petco for a "blue lobster," which is really a crayfish they sell to suckers and dads who don't ask why it's blue or why it costs $20. My son named him Erling Haaland, after the caveman-Viking soccer star who would be the most famous person on earth right now if Norway had qualified for the World Cup.

Caveman, Viking, and clawed animal are all you need to remember moving forward, for we quickly found Ronaldo II in pieces. By then, my son had permanently moved into our bed, diagonally, too scared to sleep as he worried about who will get got next.

Naturally, we got more fish — as well as a decorative headstone that reads "Flushed too soon" — but not without first consulting with the wizard-types who seem to staff the aquarium sections of pet stores. Each has distinct views on what we are doing wrong and what we should buy next; the only thing they seem to share in common is a strange desire to call this whole thing a "hobby," and a conviction that the guy at the other store doesn't know what he's talking about.

Kevin De Bruyne and Phil Foden soon joined the midfield, as well as six little yellow ones he didn't even bother to name because they had about as much chance as Team USA. They each disappeared in six diagonal nights of tears, the drama coming to a head when we added Ronaldo III to the tank and Haaland tried to kill him immediately.

The World Cup analogies no longer worked. No, this fish tank had turned into "Game of Thrones," but with a bigger budget. It consumed my life. At one point, we took a trip to the New England Aquarium, and what my wife and I paid the most attention to was how the divers cleaned the tank.

On Nov. 18, my mother's birthday, we were late to meet my parents for dinner because we had to stop at Petco to return the killer crayfish. Did you know you can return a living creature within 30 days if you have a receipt? What a country. But a hearty thanks to Petco, because after wrestling Haaland out of the tank to keep him from killing Ronaldo III, no one seemed to like my suggestion (that I "take it to live on a farm") or my son's suggestion (that we just get him his own, second tank).

With Haaland back at Petco, waiting to go home with someone else and murder all their fish, we went to a proper aquarium store for advice on how to stop the bloodshed. At European Aquatics in Malden, which takes the "hobby" of owning fish extremely seriously, their wizard asked my son and me what kind of plants we had in the tank, as we both looked at our feet and mumbled "the plastic kind." We left there with a bag of floating plants, a school of eight little fish, and six tiny catfish that he promised would keep the bottom of the tank clean and healthy.

I'm pretty sure all those little fish are gone, and at least half of the catfish, but it's hard to tell because those floating plants immediately triggered what is called, if I've been Googling correctly, an "algae bloom" so thick you can't see to the other side of the tank.

And that's where we currently stand, as I sit out of town, wondering — nothing more — what would happen if our power went out for a long time and the filter and heater went down.

I know it's not wise to announce in the newspaper that you're out of town, lest anyone view it as an invitation to break in. But if you do, please promise you'll take the fish tank.

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Billy Baker can be reached at billy.baker@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram @billy_baker.