siren song of the hagfish
I have been sick again, which is boring to read about and much, much more boring to experience. I’ve had an EXTREME COLD for 8 days now, which is suspicious, but even more suspicious is the sheer volume of mucus my head is capable of producing - I honestly can’t believe it. I had a 45-minute conversation with someone this week, never once breaking the chorus of the saddest single-nostril’d stream of toilet paper trumpet salute. And then, pinkeye, again. Didn’t even go to the doctor. Just used the drops from the last round of pinkeye, mere months ago. See? Boring!!!!! But — wild to have a “cold” in a 100-degree heatwave, wilder still to step outside at 2:45pm to fetch my kid from camp, chafed-nosed and dizzy from standing up too quickly, a wave of heat hitting my 178th fistful of toilet paper kleenex.
One of my new favorite writers, Celia Mattison, who writes the wonderful movie-review substack
, this week published what Ariel would actually look like if The Little Mermaid were scientifically accurate. I laughed a lot at this piece but at one point she referenced eye-less hagfish so I immediately had to google image what a hagfish even looked like:
lol ooooKAYYYYY….
As prey behavior, when disturbed, these, let’s face it, uncircumcised sea phalluses, can fill a 5-gallon bucket full of slime. Their “slime” takes less than a second to expand by a factor of 10,000, and works to ward off predators as menacing as SHARKS.
Grosser, though, was in 2017, when a truck full of hagfish (heading to South Korea, where they are considered a delicacy) was overturned on a freeway. The hagfish were strewn across a stretch of the road, and in their (presumably) first traffic accident, they secreted an array of slime en masse so horrifying it just has to make you laugh……..
I was startled, and almost comforted, at finding the aquatic visual synonym to my head for the last week. That car has been my utterly stalled head, energy, and career, and that slimy sea they created on the road has been the inside of my sinus cavity. Sorry 2 gross you out, but I feel like you all needed to see this. Guess I’m just a naturalist!!!
Related - I cannot impress upon you enough how crucial it is to immediately watch this documentary - The Deepest Breath - just released on N**flix. It follows an Italian woman and her boyfriend, determined to break (incredibly dangerous) freediving world records. Breathtaking footage and locks you in within the first 4 minutes - really extraordinary look at a tiny, fierce, pulmonary-pushing subset of sports. I read about it in
’s substack Books and Bits and luckily I can trust her on just about any recommendation.I watched part of it with Rowan and he immediately asked to go jump in the pool and practice “free diving.” He pulled the hose into the shallow end and swam to the 4-foot depths, imagining himself breaking world records, assigning Zoe as his “safety diver.”
