A popular and apocryphal piece of trivia about the lobster is that its biologically immortal. Which is sort of true. Lobsters cannot die from old age. The most common causes of lobster death are disease, blunt trauma, starvation, stress, anxiety, crimes of passion, and bad luck. The other way a lobster dies is by choice. As the lobster grows older, the pain of shedding its shell over and over wears it down. With every new shell come new hobbies, new friends, a whole new life. Sure, it’s fun, but every lobster eventually tires. To extract itself, a lobster must push out of the old shell and emerges raw like a penis from foreskin (but with more dignity). It takes so much work. And sometimes all that work makes the lobster think “well, that’s enough of that,” and it allows itself to die.
The opposite of lobsters is cancer. Cells are supposed to die but sometimes cells will undergo what is clinically known as “lobster envy.” Immortality is right there, and the cell chooses to ignore those self-destruct orders coded into its nucleic acids. Cancer sucks up all the oxygen in the room and when everything else dies, it dies too. But it doesn’t care, because immortality just means being the last one out the door. If everything else dies, if you’re the last, that’s good enough.
Lobsters repel cancer. Cancer repels lobsters. If you could somehow place a lobster on one side of a great riverboat wheel and at its opposite, a massive, cancerous tumor, you would form a perpetual motion machine, turning and turning. But lobsters refuse to be anywhere near cancer, and it would never work out because there are labor laws against that sort of thing.
Lobsters were supposed to grow inside people and cancer was supposed to crawl between muddy rocks and across the grainy seafloor. Tumors would’ve grown fins and exoskeletons and been hauled ashore in great nets to boil in steel pots and be placed alongside ramekins of butter. Lobsters would’ve nestled inside ribcages, growing and shedding, and people would’ve grown in harmony with their lobsters and as lobster and person grew, their stomachs would’ve swelled too, a race of giant-gutted, peaceful folk who all eventually realized that there was a time go and when we found that time, we would’ve gone with our lobsters leading the way.
But it all went wrong and instead we let cancer tell us how to die, and we eat lobsters and send them into our bellies in pieces.
