Your Goldfish Didn't Run Away

So on the way home from work today I was behind a car with a Batman logo sticker and a bumpersticker that said, "Your Goldfish Didn't Run Away," and I know there was an earthquake in China, there's an epidemic Ebola outbreak in Africa, and it seems like Russia and Isreal are basically starting wars right now...  ...but...  I'm seriously pondering the meaning of those bumpstickers.  Especially the comment on the goldfish running away...

I mean...goldfish don't run away.  Did that person suffer from shield type parenting?  Were they the ever more so jaded and glub because of it?  Is it about self delusion of obvious truths?  The white lie that's off-white? 

Were they less upset by the lie of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy?  Were they not told these lies?  Were they exposed to every reality, except that of death?  Had they come home one day, a plump pink youth, careless on the matters of death and dying to only come upon the fumbling parent that was too honest to replace the goldfish outright but in the face of such despicable truth, they faulter on their truth telling and profess crazily that their children's beloved pet had impossibly ran away?  To spare them loss but to only instead replace it with false hope?  So their kid pauses perplexed by such an obvious lie, that they lose some of the pink, some of the plumpness.

Knowing, they had been abandoned and that they had been left by their much beloved pet.

Yet feeling hesitant to believe this.

When the real truth is...

...that kid over fed that goldfish, until its stomach exploded.  So the kid is an unintentional murderer. 

The parent doesn't know this however.  So, they lie to their kid.  And even though the kid knows the parent is lying, they choose to believe their lie.  Only to live out a moment of scorn sometime in middle school, when every classmate calls bullshit on the story of a run away goldfish.

So the kid crys and stammers.  They can't defend their lying parent.

But at 25 they can get a customized bumper sticker made from a website for only $10, and they put it, like a forever motto on the bumper of their car.  So even insignificant strangers like myself would go on, touched and moved by a very minor event, wondering at how they came about championing for Dada-esque truth.

Because the truth is, that goldfish really didn't fucking run away, it peddled away on a damn bike.

But who the hell is going to believe *that*?