I keep thinking it’s Tuesday.

Once upon a time, I clipped a three panel comic from some newspaper. For a while the clipping followed me around, hanging on the walls of the places I slept and worked. That little rectangle of newsprint always seemed relevant. The comic was a little bit dumb, a little bit deep, and it helped me keep things in perspective.

It was a drawing of a goldfish in a bowl, with a little thought bubble over it’s head that said “I keep thinking it’s Tuesday”. I’m not sure when the clipping disappeared from my walls, but it did. Last I remember, it had turned yellow and brittle.

My first attempt to find the comic on the internet turned my world upside down. Google punched me in the gut, telling me that hippos, not goldfish, think it’s Tuesday.

For me, this was a Keyser Soze-ish moment. Were the goldfish actually hippos this whole time? What was happening? Was I dreaming? Was someone messing with me? Something was wrong. My heart skipped a beat.

I tweaked my search to include goldfish. Google didn’t turn up any pictures, but there was… something. The fourth result from the top mentioned a lone goldfish and a thought bubble.

I was relieved. Somewhere on the internet, there was a goldfish thinking it was Tuesday. I wasn’t a stuck in bad dream. I wasn’t going insane. I leaned in and glared like a hardened police captain in some terrible 1980s action movie. I snarled “find me that fish” and clicked.

I was getting closer. A text-only list of comics held at the MSU Libraries Comic Art Collection confirmed the goldfish comic’s existence: Mutts, October 11th, 2000.

Hippos be damned. I could care less that the goldfish comic’s punchline was lifted word-for-word from a different comic published three decades prior. As far as I was concerned, the Mutts comic was still brilliant. If there was a goldfish pondering the day of the week somewhere out there, I was going to find it.

I visited Mutts’ official site, muttscomics.com. Searching for Goldfish and Tuesday on the site yielded nothing. “Your search did not match any contents”, the website sneered in broken English.

The site also had an archive section. “Use the slider to view the past 14 strips.” But, browsing further into the past was impossible. I needed a time machine.

Or, maybe I just needed to take a closer look at what was already in front of me. I opened up Chrome Web Inspector like I was dusting for fingerprints. Eureka! The image files on the Mutts website were named based on the dates the comics were published!

I typed the file name 101100.gif like I was typing missile launch codes and pressed return. October 11th, 2000. LAUNCH SEQUENCE INITIATED. I KEEP THINKING IT’S TUESDAY.