COCAINE SHRIMP AND THE FOUL TIDE OF PROGRESS

Some stories find you at the bottom of a glass, in that murky hour when the neon outside is bleeding through the grimy window of a forgotten bar and the bartender is staring at you with the dead-eyed patience of a vulture. That’s where I was when I heard about the shrimp. I was somewhere south of reason, nursing a lukewarm whiskey and chasing the ghost of an idea, when the headline flashed across the bar’s dusty television: ‘Cocaine Found in Every Shrimp Tested in English Waterways.’

I blinked. I looked at the dregs of my drink, then back at the screen. For a moment, I thought the whiskey had finally won, that the frayed wires in my brain had snapped completely and I was now hallucinating the final, perfect punchline to the sick joke that is modern existence. But no, it was real. Some poor bastards in lab coats had gone on a deep dive into England’s rivers and pulled up a net full of shrimp, every last one of them zooted to the gills on Columbia’s finest export.

My first thought wasn’t about pollution, or the ecosystem, or the delicate balance of Mother Nature. My first thought was: ‘of course’. Of course the shrimp are on blow. Why the hell not? We’re all on something, aren’t we? Caffeine, nicotine, antidepressants, ambition, fear. We’re a nation of twitching, nervous wrecks, marinating in a chemical soup of our own making. Why should the crustaceans get a pass?

This is it. This is the terminal stop on a savage journey that started somewhere back in the garden of Eden and ended here, with coked-out crustaceans in the River Stour. It’s the kind of news that clarifies things, that peels back the thin veneer of civilization and shows you the frantic, gibbering madness underneath. We’ve finally done it. We’ve polluted the planet so thoroughly with our own vices that the wildlife is now developing the same expensive habits as a 1980s stockbroker.

I ordered another whiskey and imagined the scene. Little shrimp, their beady eyes wide, their tiny legs twitching, arranging lines of powder on a piece of algae with a rolled-up fish scale. Maybe they have their own tiny kingpins, their own turf wars fought in the murky depths over the best runoff pipes. It’s a wild ride to think about, a whole microscopic narco-state thriving in the muck, funded by the piss and waste of the upright apes who think they’re running the show.

This isn’t just about drugs. It’s a symptom of a much deeper sickness. We’re living in an age of total saturation, where nothing is pure and everything is contaminated. The water, the air, the food, the news, our own goddamn thoughts. It’s all been tainted. We’ve pumped our world so full of poison and plastic and pharmaceuticals that the very fabric of reality is starting to fray. The shrimp are just the canaries in the coal mine, if the canaries had a crippling blow habit and a tendency to stay up for three days straight talking about their brilliant new idea for a screenplay.

I tried to explain this to the bartender, a man whose face was a roadmap of bad decisions. He just polished a glass and grunted. “Everyone’s got a story,” he said, which I suppose is true. And this is the story of our time: a tragicomedy of excess, a full-throttle, balls-to-the-wall race to the bottom, and the bill is finally coming due. We are so far off the rails we can’t even see the tracks anymore.

This is the death of the American dream, the British dream, ‘any’ dream that involved a future that wasn’t a dystopian fever dream. The promise was a house, a car, a family, a little slice of peace. The reality is a world where you can’t even eat a shrimp cocktail without wondering if you’re going to fail a drug test.

I paid my tab and stumbled out into the night. The air was thick and tasted of chemicals. I walked past the shuttered storefronts and the flickering streetlights, feeling like a ghost in a dying city. The news about the shrimp had burrowed into my soul. It was more than just a weird headline; it was a prophecy.

We’re all in the belly of the beast, swimming in the same contaminated water. Some of us are just better at ignoring the taste. But the foul tide is rising, and sooner or later, we’re all going to have to face the jittery, paranoid, coked-out reality we’ve created. The shrimp know. They’ve seen the future. And it’s one hell of a party.