I Am a Lobster, I Am a Barnacle

Track nine on Little Hug (April 2021). Luke solo. After the title hook, it’s mostly spoken marine biology read aloud and turned, accidentally, into a love poem. The text is real: whale barnacles ride along without harming the whale (textbook commensalism), and the narrator keeps snagging on the detail that they give helpful lice (cyamids) somewhere to hang. The phrase loops and breaks down (helpful lice? lice? like hair lice?) as the fact collides with the gross-out image, commensalism repeated like a mantra he can’t quite hold.

Then it slips into meaning: it’s symbiotic / but it’s also kinda parasitic / like you and me / I’m barnacle / and you’re the sea. The metaphor wobbles on purpose, a barnacle rides the whale, not the sea, and the relationship is the unstable ecology. It ends not on a verdict but on the one human question buried in the citations: does it itch? No answer, just the fact repeated.

After Can’t Imagine Feeling Better and before Don’t Know Much: joy, weird science love, then epistemic spiral. Same domestic weirdness as I’m Addicted to Baths, Little Hug letting the joke be the whole song.

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I am a lobster
I am a barnacle

Okay so
Barnacles are just along for the ride
They don't harm the whales
Or feed on the whales
Like true parasites do
Barnacles don't serve any obvious advantage to the whales

But they give helpful lice
A place to hang on the whale
Without being
Helpful lice?
Lice?
They give helpful lice

The lice in my head
On a whale

How does that work?
So it's like
Wait, lice?
Like hair lice?

Commensalism
Commensalism

It's symbiotic
But it's also kinda parasitic
Like you and me
I'm barnacle
And you're the sea

Whale lice feed on algae and whale skin
But there is no evidence that whale lice are harmful to whales

Does it itch?

There is no evidence that whale lice are harmful to whales