In the light of the current political climate, and the clear benefit exemplified by G. Gordon Liddy getting his own syndicated show, isn't it about time for your to own up to your involvement in Watergate?

Yours,
Wondering in Washington

Dearest Wondering:

I know nothing of this Can-Lid man. Or his Cuban co-conspirators. Or of the sound that an Attorney General makes when he comes in from the raining with his slickered raining coat up-on his head (Whoop-hoo! Whoop-hoo!, the cloak swinging out and back like and unto the wings of an overweight bat).

My huge brain, on the matter and substance of this important national topic, is completely tabula rasa. For eighteen full minutes there is nothing inside of my Cephalitic Sack, save a dizzied foreboding and a surly, anti-semitic hiss.

But, as to the dreaded and secret Watered Gate of Washingtonia, yes there is indeed a great deal of truth which must at this final and late date to be revealed.

You see, it is a new age, my Dear and Devoted Readers. An Aquarian Age, as they say, with the Moon within its second domicile and Jupiter of the alignment of Mars; although peace has yet to guide the planets in any active or useful way, Love still steers the stars— specifically, steers them in an ever-widening and purposeless gyre that, truth to tell, will eventually lead to the entire dissolution of this unremarkable spiral galaxy. Once again, love brings us to destruction, much as the wheels upon the omnibus go 'round and 'round, up and down, all over the town.

But aside, I wonder, tangential— not unlike those guile-less stars, whirling out towards oblivion and forgetfulness. But, for to explain this Age of Aquaria: Recall, in the moony days of pre-ice-age human living, there had been a cruel fisted rule of females across the land. Great and all devouring queens more terrible then the steely fisted boudicaens Brittanica. After the ice drove mankind into a much deserved retreat for an epoch, there arose a second age of humans upon the earth. It was the moderately peaceful, moderately predictable, and sadly slow-witted male age of Osiris. And now, we have slipped secretly, as Crowley muttered, into the third great age, that Age of the ressurected Osiris, who is called Horus, who is both male and female, like and unto the nude and nailed pretty boy Christ, with his soft ringlets and supple lips, his six-packed abdomen and monstrous, tumescent member— and for that hemaphrodidtic reason this God, this Age, is awesome and horrifying to behold.

To quote of Rob, who is himself so often the coiner of phraseology apt, is is an Age of Gods "Shemale sex-tastic."

Ah, agreed, Shemale sex-tastic, indeed.

But the rising wave of this Hawk Age, the Boy Age, the gleaming and polished NordicTrak age of self-improvement and androgyny, did not as you have been told begin amongst the bonged smoke and wheat germ consumption of the Johnson administration. It did not even begin with my good comrade, Aleister, and his unfortunate band of sycophantic onanistic followers casting their circles and drawing upon their winds.

No, it began with a young engineer who, in 1826, called upon my assistance to help build a certain Gate on a small tributary of the lower Potomac.

Belasco LaFayette had been, for all purposes practical, ejected from Scotland when his father ceased to live. Hiram LaFayette, a descendant of one of Mary's original attendants from her exile in France, was also distantly related to that fair general who so gallantly lent his assistance to the colonial armies.

The LaFayettes had never been of "strong" Catholic belief, and the progenitor who attached himself to Mary's court for his own aggrandizement, was in all certainty no exception. But what had been taken as a cosmopolitan attitude in France became, in Scotland, at best an agnostic manner and at worst, a sign of sympathy for the protestant rule of Elizabeth of England.

After greater than one-hundred plus years of shuttling among house and haystack in the high country, refuged only by ancient Lollards and brothers of the Scottish Rite, the LaFayettes were finally expelled from their adopted homeland. Hiram's death had left the family in a precarious place economically, and thus it was the Eldest Boy, Belasco, who lead the family westwardly.

Like so many others of the time, expulsion lead them ultimately to cargo ship and then on to the shores of the new Virginia, where the idiosyncratic beliefs of accomplished engineers like the LaFayettes were not only tolerated, but in some circles greatly honored.

Some help came Belasco's way upon his arrival, as he was of fortune met at the docks in Savannah by a clerk, from the Cotton Exchange, bearing a proposition for some certain engineering feats. It was at this point I entered the scene (figuratively, to be sure— when we arrive to the exchanges and intercourse of dry land, I bear little interest in actually humping and slithering along the cobbled roads and dusty thoroughfares), called to advise in certain calculations and measurements intollereant to the error of human eyes.

Engineers across the continent and on the British Isles were trapped, along with all other of humankind, in the conflict betwixt Christ's Vicar and the undead compass and square of Hiram Abiff. Was this conflict over matters of great import? By no means. One might characterize it as "two head-bald simians fighting over teh ownership and use of a hair comb." Nonetheless, fight they did. By the hundreds, enlightened minds like those of the Lafayette family were streaming to the shores of the Americas from Halifax to Buenos Aires, although upon their heels marched those Columbian Knights and their Jesuit masters.

Followers of the Great Architect who had helped create this magnificent beacon of light in the New World were keenly aware of the doubled-edge of the problem: On the dexter blade-half, their ranks swelled with each new enlightened Deist to come ashore. But, greasing the sinister blade-bit, with each new American came another slathering papist dog. Did not the ants go marching two-by-two, hurrah, huzzah?

And so, while men like Lafayette were wanted very much by the Architects of America, certain bargains had to be struck in the name of a better national defense. For each new arrival, a new Master-Piece of sorts was required, much like an unto the journeymen of old, establishing themselves with great works of ingenuity and brainy daring-do. And frequently, the completion of the required piece would entail certain other . . . bargains.

It was a simple seeming plan that the Georgian clerk proposed to Belasco. He needed to extend and improve upon a series of gates and wheels that helped to drive a mill that was powered by a small but quick tributary of the Potomac. A simple matter, for one who might, in the nighted depths, see clearly.

But in addition to this, with my help, he was to acquire certain unnameable relics from the benthic ruins of an ancient and passed world upon the bottom of the sea which might enhance the Gate, and integrate it into a larger coastal network of defenses against the cruel and crooked clawed reach of the hand of Christ, the Androgyn.

And, of the course, there was the inevitable matter of simple maintenance to this strange engine. I need not remind the Gentle and Devoted Reader that, invariably, it is in the cost of maintenance that a grand public utility, either mundane or preternatural, becomes a crushing economic burden. Wonder not why, in this age of little co-operation by squidkind and humankind, only the largest and most lavish governments can afford grandiose dams and palatial, sub-marine sea labs and shopping malls.

But to return to the thrust, I, a squid still young yet, in a manner, nonetheless almost ageless in his ennui, would not think twice before becoming embroiled in such a work, what with the promise of a dread contraption which, with each rotation of the wheel and each opening and closing of the sluice gate, some little more of the diabolical energy of Ancient Dead Yet Sleepless Gods was released. Not to mention the nigh unto guarantee of some colossal primate botch-up resulting in great and terrible chaos and despair.

Round the whole of our water mill and the surrounding dales of the Virginia countryside their arose a foul cloud of bituminous vapor. For, each time this Watered-Gate opened, it tore a little more at the fabric of sanity in the world, and pricked a little more at the Christian might which reached across the ocean.

But then, there came a fool (for do not these tales always have such fools?) He was a drunkard and an Irishman, although which was the greater crime still remains a matter for debate, and he ran afoul of certain cattle that had been degenerated by the actions-mystical of the watered gate. The cows, rich and surly with cabalistic powers, careered a-toward the drunkard and pitched him dead into the river where he bloated and bobbed, his death-stench unsmelt by the townspeople, their nostrils deadened by the long-tolerated evil odours of the spiritual device we had built from the bones and steel of Lemurian dead.

Finally, after bloating and then bursting in the slow and tepid foulness of the river, the dead Irishman got stuck in the beautiful horror that was our carefully constructed Watered Gate.

Not only was he en-stuck, but with him had come a small prayer book and a silvered crucifix about the neck. These symbols and his innebriated faith still clung together about his rotting flesh, and reacted most unfavorably with the clean burning evil of our device.

It was this which called to us the attention of the Base Creator, this Jehovah-Creature, who formed matter from nothing and gave messy complication to the clean, uncaring cosmos.

"What in the hell have you people been doing down here," Said HE, the creator of all base matter.

"We've built a mystical water gate that drives away your cursed people from across the sea so that enlightened men might peacefully construct beautiful things without the mill-stone of pagan superstition," said Belasco, quite clearly.

"First of all, the Catholics aren't mine," replied the Creator. "Not bad folk, mind you, but misguided." He sighed. He was wearing a mesh-backed cap, green with a small tractor embroidered in the corner. As he sighed he sat down on a rock and pulled the cap off so that he might rub a hanky across the deeply tanned bald pate that he had hidden.

"Second," he continued, blowing his nose with the sweaty hanky, one nostril at a time, "second, you're doing what with a gate?"

"By the way of sacred engineering and design, and by the application of ancient rituals and the hallowed bodies of the fallen beings of long sunken Mu, we have constructed a small gateway to the world of The Great Old ones. Their presence is leaked out, little by little, with each turn of that wheel and by increments this New World is protected from the Papists."

God held the bridge of his nose. If he had worn spectacles, he would have taken them and rubbed his eyes. "Okay. You've clearly given this a lot of thought, so I have to respect that but . . . I mean, jeez! What are you talking about? That fart smell. THAT is how you plan on keeping away the Catholics?"

At that yell, Belasco, who was already quite afeared, fell to his knee.

"Oh, dark Demi-Urge, I do not honor you in life, but I fear you. Command of me a new project so that I might live."

"You see what happens when you become a relativist?" God said. "You sell your soul once, and it doesn't mean anything, so now you are going to sell it again. How many times will you switch sides?"

"Just command me, oh terrible one. To what might I turn my enlightened brain?"

The Jehovah-Creature flicked his hands up in the air and turned away. As he faded into the ethereal other-scape, he said, "Just . . . I don't care . . . You know, this is why I don't visit. You people are fucked up."

Unsure as to what that might mean, Belasco set in motion a series of events which would ultimately lead to the building of a certain hotel. A hotel which I know nothing about.

And God, HE was true to his word. He never visited Washington again.

At that I myself propulsed down river and out ocean, and following the First Causes' good example never returned to Washingtonia, not until this past years autumn.

And recall we not how poorly that turned out for all involved, do we not?

In the Interest of Sincerity,
The Giant Squid