Don’t Call it a Comeback

Hello blogosphere! I know it’s been a hot minute since I appeared in this space. It turned out I needed the break. I also have had less time to write as I spent the last school year working full-time at a middle school where I learned to use phrases like “it’s been a hot minute.” I had a great year and would happily return for another, but life is shifting again, as it does. 

For well over a year now, my husband has been dealing with a long commute for a job that he loves. With our youngest son’s graduation from high school this spring, we’ve been looking to escape the bustling suburb that has been our home for more than a decade, searching for more land, a smaller house, and a shorter drive.

I’m pleased to report that we found all three, but as his route to work is shortening, mine is lengthening too much for my position to be practical. And that’s okay, because now, in between renovation projects on our new kind of weird house that sits on the pretty much perfect land, I can spend more time writing again.

Because when I see a majestic creature like this, the first thing I think is that it sure would look good in a hat. Minette Layne from Seattle, Washington, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I’m excited to be back. I’ve missed this sharing of vaguely historical and occasionally hysterical tidbits, kind of like one misses the hottest trends of their childhood. I’m seriously at least as excited as I would be if celebrities suddenly started wearing acid wash jeans again, we all decided to walk like an Egyptian, or whales donned dead salmon hats. 

Okay, so you may not have been entirely hip to Orca culture of the late 1980s like I have recently pretended to be, but yes, apparently, there was a brief window of time in 1987 when trendy killer whales, particularly those who frequented the Puget Sound, placed jaunty dead fish on their enormous heads.

Why they did this researchers aren’t sure, but then acid wash jeans didn’t make a lot of sense either. Some suggest it was a clever way to save some food for later during times of abundance. Orcas have been known to swim with large chunks of food tucked under a fin, a mode of transportation that isn’t terribly practical for a relatively small fish like a salmon. That fits much better as a hat. 

Or it could just be a playful fashion statement that this year has seen a little bit of a comeback. It’s definitely not as wide-spread as it was in 1987, but then I suppose the retro look isn’t for everyone. 

In case you want to dress like a fashionable Orca, Amazon has you covered.

Still, there have been a few instances over the past several months of Orcas once again sporting dead fish hats, enough to get some in the whale fashion industry to declare it a hot trend of the season, similar to the boat rudder disabling challenge that cropped up a couple years ago or the orca kelp massage fad surging right now, that is surely the result of a whale lifestyle influencer.

And why not bring back a little bit of fun, like a silly hat in a great big briny sea, or one more hopefully amusing, poorly researched, sort-of history blog written by a real human being drifting in a metaphorical sea of the artificially intelligent web.

I mean, I’m not walking like an Egyptian, but I am pretty excited to be back.