Gay Boy Thailand

Chalerm’s aquarium project is not going well. Of 23 fish he has bought, first 13 and then 10 more a week later, only four are still alive.

Some died because they jumped out of the water – which again has to do with the top cover that “someone” sat on and broke when setting up the aquarium. Others have gone belly-up without explanation.

Chalerm got a new top cover so at least we no longer find fish on the floor in the morning.

I bought my aquarium when I was Chalerm’s age. I did it the farang way. I went to the library and read all the books about aquariums that I could find. Chalerm is doing it the Thai way, which is do it first and find out how later.

I suspect the Bangkok tap water is to blame. I have offered Chalerm to fill the aquarium with bottled water but he didn’t want that.

The aquarium crisis is a sensitive issue in this house. I am not allowed to interfere or offer my overbearing farang advice. Chalerm had taken five of the biggest fish out of the tank one night and I woke him in the morning, pointing out that in the small bucket the fish were going to the surface, gasping as they do when they are short of oxygen. Chalerm said he did this deliberately to kill them. He looked angry when he said that so I believed him.

It turned out his anger was not a case of fish murder impulse, but annoyance that I poked my nose into the affair. Soon the fish were back in the tank. He had taken the big ones out because he feared they ate the smaller ones. He points to bite marks on fins as evidence.

The only fish to do well and prosper in the aquarium are two bottom-feeders. They are fish with a vacuum cleaner mouth and they eat the algae that grow on the inside of the glass.

I wonder if I should quietly buy some zebra fish. They are the easiest to keep. Scientists use them as the watery equivalent of lab rats. With an 80% casualty rate the first two weeks our aquarium is the survival of the fittest.