Some movies should be rated R, not because of explicit sex, or violence or swearing, just because it’s unnatural and bizarre for kids to watch. Let’s say 2001: A Space Odyssey for example. It’s rated G, but this is an R movie.

If your kid chooses to watch this movie, you have a real odd duck on your hands. It’s a good movie, beautiful etc., but you’d feel weird about your kid picking it for movie night. Not in the same way if they were watching… oh let’s say Crank 2: High Voltage, a movie that features a scene where Jason Statham dry humps an old woman at a horse track, but weird.

Some rules should just exist due to vibes.

Like how I think it should be illegal to eat sharks. Not because of some kind of endangered species issue or health reason or anything practical, I just think it’s not for us. The shark has been on planet earth for a billion years (I’m guessing) and has held a top predator spot throughout the bulk of its run (probably). It’s shouldn’t be up to us to decide we can just pull it out of the water and chop it up into bits and eat it like it’s a common salmon (a fish we should certainly be eating).

Sharks famously never sleep, yet somehow waste no time at all. The animal that has the most time to kill, figuratively and literally, doesn’t know how to read, or have hands to play video games or jack off with. If you showed it an episode of Bosch it would have no idea what Bosch was doing or even which character is Bosch. Sharks exist to swim around and eat things and they’re very, very good at it.

Humans on the other hand? All we do is kill time. We locked up our top spot on the food chain a few thousand years ago and we’re bored. So bored that we decided to play god and eat the sharks who, I’ve established, are god’s perfect little guys.

I can’t tell you with any certainty if a shark can think, but supposing it does, you’d imagine it must hate humans. Most don’t even know about us, and when they do, we typically leave a bad impression. It’s really a shame the shark has all that time but no capacity for pettiness. Imagine how petty you or I could be with a shark’s no-distractions schedule. 

And I’m no exception to the rule of hate-able humans. So of course when a friend texted me that he caught a shark and wanted me to cook it, I jumped at the chance. I’ve never done it, I like cooking and it’s a low risk/high reward situation. If I’m bad at cooking shark, it’s understandable. It’s a shark, and I’m not a seafaring man. I’ve never really even seen one outside of an aquarium or Jaws setting.

I wish I could say I was conflicted about it. Such a noble animal, with a strong cultural impact to boot. The shark is a movie star, a nature documentary mainstay and is far more telegenic than me.

Plus I had heard that shark meat can taste like piss because when you catch them they get so stressed out they piss themselves and they piss through their skin (unlike you and I) so they just piss up all the meat as a farewell fuck you.

Even still, I was pretty excited to eat one!

So I cooked and ate the planet’s longest running predation champion. Made some shark tacos. Grilled our little champ on skewers with a wasabi ginger lime mustard glaze, then put our apex killing machine on grocery store corn tortillas with some chives, and out of season tomato with a little garlic sriracha sauce. Not bad! I’ve got a lot to learn about cooking shark but a decent first stab at it.

Then the next day everyone that enjoyed eating this little fella texted the chain to regale the rest with stories about how bad our gas was. Unheard of levels of stink almost as soon as we were out the door. From everyone.

Touché shark, you scored your final point from beyond the grave, but I have had the last laugh, because farts are funny. You might have known that if you were as smart as a human.

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