K: The trick to making out alive? Playing “What Would Bear Do”.
J: Because he would no sooner make out with a zombie than forget to breathe while frenching?
K: I’m so incredibly confused! Why would Bear Grylls forget to breathe?!
J: Because then he wouldn’t be making out alive, he would be making out… DEAD *In David Caruso voice* 

So here’s a story about tree-dwelling fish:

There once was a puffer-fish named Marvin Gaye. He lived in a most fascinating tree and ate the most fascinating spaghetti (with freshly-cracked parmesan M&Ms, of course) in the most fascinating way – and considering that he is a tree-dwelling puffer-fish eating spaghetti, you can be sure that this truly was most fascinating. He was one of the few, if any there were, tree-dwelling, spaghetti-devouring  puffer-fish who could say, without any question or,  more remarkably still, vocal chords, that he was wholly content with his life. “On land,” he once said figuratively, “everything  is peaches and ice-cream”. Being up a tree (I believe it now to have been your average money tree), he seldom had to keep watch for poachers. This calming fact, Marvin Gaye realised in his third week of living here. Being on land for most of our lives, and not being puffer-fish ourselves, not having to look out for poachers mustn’t seem a big deal, nor a particularly interesting realisation. For us, this is just the norm. Are we not taught at a very young age that when on land, poachers stay in the kitchens eating eggs? Also, they seldom poach humans. Being a puffer-fish, however, and one still unaccustomed to land-life, Marvin Gaye was very relieved to learn this.

The word ‘deflated’ has a very different meaning in the puffer-fish vernacular. To us, it means to have lost energy, vim or pluck. For us, in our overly perky, smile-or-die society, it is a negative word. On the other hand (or fin, as the case may have it), puffer-fish yearn to have a life in which they are almost constantly deflated. This does not make them negative creatures, however. To be inflated (in quite a literal sense) for Marvin Gaye and associates means to be scared, stressed, or worried. Inflation can turn their spikes white overnight. As it is for humans, stress shortens the life expectancy of the puffer-fish, and their buttery diets – though delicious both for them and the poachers (when they can tear themselves away from their eggs, at least) – result in their having very short life expectancies already.  But you don’t want to hear about the health of puffer-fish.  Before moving on, I best just quickly add that they are also incredibly lactose-intolerant, their dairy always being heavily watered down in the ocean.

Money trees have very thin branches upon which it is notoriously hard for a puffer-fish to balance, even harder when the fish itself is puffed.  Nine out of every ten puffer-fish who have ever tried to live in a money tree have fallen off due to their anxiety-induced inflation. Days of Zen training, weeks of unicycle races (he couldn’t afford a bicycle) and months of practicing medicine, however, left Marvin Gaye with the balance, patients and discipline needed  to remain perfectly perched upon the thin, green branches. 

One day, unexpectedly, it rained.  Living deep under the sea for all of his life (at this point, it is estimated that Marvin Gaye had been alive for three years), our fishy hero had never experienced precipitation. (Bearing in mind that he was a doctor and able to live comfortably in a money tree, it may be hard for you to believe what I’m about to tell you about a very clever fish, but it is true and I therefore must report it. Also, you must remember what I have just said: he had never even imagined rain before.) Marvin Gaye thought it was the sea coming back to claim him. He had, after all, been good friends with Jimi Hendrix, who later turned out not only to have written a song about Neptune, but was the God of the Sea himself. He knew better than to doubt the powers of his friend and knew far too well the jealousy Hendrix already felt towards Kate Bush, Goddess of the Trees. So consumed Marvin Gaye was in the idea that Hendrix felt abandoned by his one and only puffer-fish, our protagonist started to panic. And we all know what happens when puffer-fish panic. And we all know how slippery money trees become during even the lightest drizzle. All the unicycle-racing trophies and all the patients in the world could not support Marvin Gaye in his ballooned state that wet, wet day. He slipped, his spikes tearing every Nellie Melba leaf on his way down. Had he not landed in a plate of her peachy dessert, it is entirely possible that his bounciness (the most underrated and forgotten defence mechanism of the inflated puffer-fish) would have sprung him back up into his tree and all would be fine. I guess death is the just desserts for a puffer-fish living in a money tree, especially one surrounded by peaches and ice-cream.