November 2000
While lost and enisled in my earliest incarnation, in what has been known as the Years of Much Fish, alone except for my dolphin friends and saviors, I was periodically to experience a hunger so profound and pinguid that all reason would at times seem as far away and unreachable as the nearest dancing girl, scantily clad and redolent with cinnamon and sweat. Marooned as I was, bereft of the daily staples we grow accustomed to and thereafter take for granted, I would find myself aching deep within my moribund and attenuated spleen for any foodstuff that was not piscine in origin. Truly, had the opportunity arisen, I believe I would have sold my very scorpion for a biscuit, a bowl of lentil stew or a roasted lamb's haunch, dripping with garlic and butter, tender to the tooth, its gamey and seductive odor rising up to disturb even the gods' gastric juices and salivary wells. Alas, there was naught but fish, fish and more fish.
   So despondent did this make me that one afternoon, when my dolphin brothers brought my fishy lunch to the lagoon as was their custom, I refused to sup, and in a fit of all too human petulance, tossed the generous and hard won meal back into the gently lapping water. Astounded by this never before witnessed behavior, my companions clicked and squealed in shock, "Akiryon! Your senses have deserted you! That was enough fish to keep even one of our chieftains swimming heartily for many days. What ails you, O hirsute and bipedal friend?"
  Bestilling myself, I answered with not a little morosity, "My friends, you love fish. It is your great joy, your one true love. At best I never cared for it, but now I am growing to hate it with a passion that is soon to know no bounds. I am not convinced that I am capable of swallowing one more mouthful without vomiting my entire bowels onto this forlorn and desolate sand."
   "But fish is wonderful," they cried as one. "What could be more delicious, more delectable, more crunchy?"
   "Listen, my aquatic and simple-minded comrades", I replied with great solemnity, "what is delicious to you, may not be to me. The opposite is also proven to be true. You would certainly find my accustomed diet equally revolting and distasteful. Here, let me put it in such a way as to aid your comprehension of this mystery." This then is the tale that I related to them.
 
  Many lives of your ancestors long past, the kingdom of Babylon was an awesome and terrible giantess, blind to her own wrath and enebriaty. Lost in this limpid assumption, she slept, aided by wine and rich food, and lulled by the breeze sighing through the tendrils of her fabled hanging gardens. It was at this time she was taken into the captivity of ruthless and groping hands, for descending upon her slumber came the Medes and the Persians, blackguards that had raped and pillaged even the Egyptians, an empire believed unshakable and eternal.
  The Babylonians, accustomed to no masters, now had two, the Medes and the Persians. Overmanned, they gave in to the puerile and sybaritic demands of their conquerors and clung to some semblance of normal life. But as humans are wont to do, allegiances were forged, and some of the Babylonians began to prefer the Medes, while others felt more kindly disposed toward the Persians. As if this divisiveness were not enough, the Medes and Persians began to contend among themselves. First, Astyages of the Medes, angered at one Persian, Harpagus, served his foe the headless and dismembered body of his own son and forced him to dine thereon. Still later, Cambyses, leader of the Persians, after dispatching his wife, Roxana, with a well placed kick to the stomach, forced his Median enemies to dine on their own amputated testicles, compelling them to swallow their pride at swordpoint. It cannot be gainsaid that neither the Medes nor the Persians found pleasure in what they were forced to consume. Thus it is unclear as to whether it was due to these nauseating repasts or because of the divided allegiance of the Babylonian people, but today we have the adage that expresses best my present perplexity, "One man's Mede is another man's Persian."
 
  My dolphin brethren had sat rapt throughout my short but instructive discourse. Now they looked at each other quizzically. I could sense that they were carefully digesting the eternal and gelastic truths I had laid before them. Long they talked among themselves in hushed and querulous voices as the shadows of afternoon lengthened into eventide. Finally, their countenances radiant, they appeared to reach a unanimous conclusion, and pushing their beaming spokesman forward to where I reposed upon the sand, he proudly sang out, "We get it, Master! We get it! You want some more fish!"

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