Hermit Crabs Are Freaky Deaky Weirdos

And so am I.

I went to see David Sedaris speak in Savannah last week, and ever since, I’ve been thinking hard about something funny to write about my own life. But it’s only been doom and fucking gloom, doom and fucking gloom, all day every day. I’ve started to realize I’ve been living without hope ever since the first fucking George W. Bush administration, so I’ll probably die without hope at this point.

I wish I could write about my sister Tara, whom I recently started speaking to again after she cut me out of her life for 4 years. The last time she cut me out was because of a blog post I wrote about her.I will say that sometimes, my kids make me call Tara on the phone because they want to listen to her tell stories. She tells the best stories. They tell me, “Mom, don’t let her know we’re here so that she tells you real stories.” So I call her, and they are like absolute fucking statues in the back seat while Tara, who is the funniest person I’ve ever met, narrates her existence.

“E put an aquarium cleaning tablet in my water yesterday,” Tara began her story today. E is Tara’s daughter. “And I drank it, and I was like, what the Fuck is in my water?”

In the back seat, I hear the faintest sniff of a snicker, and I know for sure that one of my kids is going to put a bleach tablet or something similar in my water before I go to sleep tonight.

The only funny thing that has happened to me recently is that I think I’ve been put on some international registry of weirdos due to the enormous number of hermit crabs I’ve bought from Petsmart in the first four months of 2025. I’m constantly at Petsmart buying hermit crabs to replace the hermit crabs that have died under me and Cleo’s care.

“What are you doing with the hermit crabs that are dying?” It finally occurred to me to ask Cleo this morning as she narrated the latest death.

“Um,” she said. “They’re just disintegrating.”

“Um,” I said back. “They are definitely not just disintegrating.”

“They are,” she said.

And now I know for sure that there is some collection of dried out hermit crab carcasses in a box somewhere in Cleo’s very messy room.

Back to the international registry. At Petsmart, they don’t just let you buy a hermit crab. First of all, you have to go to the back of the store, to the lizard/bird/fish/rodent section, and wait for the very knowledgeable attendant to be available.

“How many crickets should I be feeding our albino leopard gecko?” I asked the attendant, who is a short and dead fucking serious young lady, the other day.

“Um, like, 24?”

“A week?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Fuck,” I thought to myself. I mean, that is a lot of fucking crickets to dip in calcium powder and try to feed to that finicky little bitch. Her name is Pinky.

I’m not lying when I say that she’s lived in the South for long enough that she’s gotten fucking freckles.

By the way, all of the pets I own except for the cat and dog were bought by my ex-husband, and left in the divorce. “Can you at least take the fucking hermit crabs,” I begged him when he moved out.

“I don’t want the hermit crabs!” he responded, affronted. “I’m getting cats!”

Once the attendant at Petsmart is available, she has to take each hermit crab out, and inspect it for signs of life. She takes a credit card, sticks it in the shell, and sees how the hermit crabs react. Stuck in a cage next to the parakeets, the hermit crabs usually do not act very full of life. This past week, one of them was absolutely raging, however. We chose that one. “I’ll name him Candy,” Cleo told me.

Then, after you get a plastic take out container full of hermit crabs, you have to sign about 30 forms on the attendant’s phone in order to take them home. I obviously never read the forms, I just sign, sign, sign, sign, sign, and then go pay the $11.50 or whatever the Fuck it costs to get hermit crabs. Hermit crabs are cheap. I’m usually so tired by this point that my tongue feels fat in my mouth.

I don’t check, but I know for sure that after signing the paperwork, a camera tracks my movements to the front of the store. The camera calculates my height, weight, shoe size, hair color, eye color and approximate age. That, combined with my signature, address, phone number, social security number and all of the personal information I provided, is sent out widely to potential employers, social media sites and dating apps. A warning is attached to my name.

“Bought 14 hermit crabs in April alone,” the warning says.

No more is needed to ban me from gainful employment, the ability to get healthcare, or the potential to have sex again before I die.

It’s ok, I have the dried out hermit crabs. And the alive ones. If I get lonely at night, I can sit in the darkness of Cleo’s room, and be absolutely still. As still as my children are when we call my sister Tara. I can be still, and I can wait. And eventually, the hermit crabs will come out from underneath the water dish. And they will commune. Because do you know hermit crabs are very social? And they will move around. Because do you know that hermit crabs walk up to 10 miles a night in the wild?

“What did you put in my water?” I can ask the hermit crabs.

And I’m confident, with patience, they will respond from the tops of their sticks.

“Bleach tablets, you bitch!” they’ll tell me. “No big deal!”