Below me there is a great gathering of people upon the streets of Detroit, and I remember now that this is a day of gathering, of thank-you-very-muching, of walking and talking and breathing the dry air. A Pa-Raid!

As I hang, suspended, in my frigid high-pressure tank above the City of Detroit, watching the ponderous and skittering Thank-You-Giving preparations in the streets below, I reflect on my many adventures and explorations that have made and marked my holy days since rising to the surface and taking mount of land. Still, it is without doubt, your traditions confuse and befuddle me, and I stretch and strain to come near to making to understand the whys and where-fors of these strange habits of your single-hearts, the moments of solace and generational gathering you value, and the reason for such gatherings. Of certain, I do know and appreciate that in its most basic the humans gather and huddle and share of the love because, in the gutters of their base and ancient mammalminds, they still fear those high-wind warbling, beneath-the-clouds skulking monsters of myth fogged and ancient: Large-Handed Grendel, the Dragoons of Fire, Thankor the Soulsuck, Xmas the Destroyer, Ramadan the Insatiable.

For surely, they are not concerns valid, but in the deeper recesses of the shallow brainpan, need we search too excessively for reasons? In the end— in the beginning for that matter— it seems that to you grunting, textileladen surface sorts, the gathering is its own excuse, and there be little further need for the explications and justifications. In that way, it is not unlike War, the other great human gathering-endeavor, into which such energy and effort is poured with regularity.

I, myself, am somewhat lacking in generational-gathering abilities and opportunities, as all of my generativekin and generational peers, posts and pres are of the varieties deceased or lost-at-sea. It is a sad and lonely life, generally buttressed and buoyed by my little Almanac(k), which gives to me much pleasure and distraction, especially in this most stressful holy day season, during which the suicide becomes such of a popular recourse.

Sigh

I sadly miss of my Almanac(k), and am much vexed of this extending absence bearing forth from certain technical failings of my electro-host— but worry you not of these matters; taking one form or the other electronique, I shall return to regular communications poste haste. In the meantime, lab assistant Rob has finally left his glaucomas-treating fog long enough to arrange for an alternate electronical mailing address as follows:

poormojo@gizmolabs.org

Please feel to free to utilize it in contacting me (quasi-directly) for the near-forseeable future.

In the meantime, not unlike Candide himself, perhaps I shall "tend my garden," awaiting me re-communion with you, my readership, and taking this outage inter-web-tual to the advantage in working on other projects, or even just the simple, soothing meditation upon the skitterskatter of Thanks-You-Giving celebrants below, which—

What do I see? This Pa-Raid, the raiding of the father I am to assume, has become somethingmore and terrible beneath me. Is it possible that my eyes, my treasured eyes, report inaccuracies or untruths? Down the Boulevard Beaubien, I see— coming from this Boulevard Beaubien I spy some . . . some . . .

for lack of words of precision I am left to say thing, some thing approaches. Is this the Thankor, whose Faceless Face Beyond Reckoning I have feared, for always, in the turgid backwaters of my own ponderous and profound headsac, unknowing and without recognition, a fear formless and vague but nonethelessly true? Does he come now, his minions in follow, taking the form of the bulbous brown bear? Or is this terrible flaplimbed greenfrog— a betrayer of water, born in the Holy of Deep and then forsaken it to hobscrabblecrawl across the dryland, without benefit of velocitating environmental suit— is this the form of the Thankor? Is he the terrible man form large of many colors, of the buffoonery that turns horror? Is he this 45-foot giant, the nuts-to-cracker, bumbling ever closer?

No. No, these large and floating, they are his minions, not he himself, for I spy, at their lead, with my perfect eye, the true form, the one form, the form-du-jour that the Thankor has taken: he has pulled taught over his cyclopean frame the leathery manskin of Red Winged Hall of Famoire Gordie Howe. If I squint of the eye, if I draw closer to the thin glass which separates me and my waterhome from the thousand foot drydrop to tarmac below, if I look with care and consider, I believe I can see, upon this Howe face, the smile of soul sucking hunger that is veritably the signature of the Thankor himself.

It is doubtless, now, that these floating visages of horror, these rising buoyant destroyers, do come

But do they come for me?

I Remain Now, If Not Forever,
Your Giant Squid