I am 5 months pregnant with my fiance's son and we are about to move into a home we purchased together. He shares step-children with his soon to be ex-wife, that are adults now with children of their own. Since he is locating to the city i live in, he has decided to buy a house and rent it out to his ex-wife and daughter. There would be no problem except that the ex has continued to harass me, as well as say bad things about me to the children and even gone as far as accuse my fiance of rape.

I am very worried that this will only invite more headaches as well as wonder if he is really ready to let go. Do I have any right to be furious that he won't move on and break ties to her?

Signed,
Anonymous Pregnant Furious Internet Petitioner

Dear APFIP,

Your letter brings joy unto my several hearts, although it finds me cold and hungry upon the road—ball-and-socket joint deep in the sludgy, feculent waters of Old New Orleans' Lower-then-Water Ninth Ward. To speak briefly of this Federally Managed State of Emergency, there is a great quantity of bloated human corpses here, and they are directly adjacent, and often commingled, with yet living dogs, and the and the collocation and association of the these two items, the Delicious (i.e. dogs) and the Deplorable (i.e. the unburied human dead) is . . . disturbing, to say the very least. I fear of the possibilities viz. zombies and zombification.

As such, I am more than happy to turn my attentions to this missive, your missive, which is so very unlike the greater bulk of the mailings I have received hence-to-now. Were it printed upon the mashed and dried flesh of clear-cutted trees and not merely a conspiracy of pixels dancing across the tiny, watertight terminal, friscalating its light upon the corneas of my most perfect eyes . . . were this letter a letter of paper and solid mater, I would clasp it tightly, and tuck it talismanically betwixt my mantle and the wall of my robo-velocitating travelling suit.

You see, dear readers, the vast and wrenching majority of letters I receive—the pleas for guidance and information—arrive anonymously from the mewling mouths of primates who are primarily prisoners of our primary schools, it seems. The questions they ask of me in my most exalted position concern only three mysteries: Dear President Squid, What is the chief foodstuff you gorge yourself upon nightly? Dearest Giant Squid, Where do you lie your many-tonned brain-sac when Yob'Shottotho the Dreamsprayer happens upon you? Dear Mr. Squido, How large are you?

For every tearful plea for filial direction such as yours, there are hundreds upon hundreds of simple queries from grunting dirtchimps who ignore the FAQ that has so carefully been crafted to deal with their snot-nostriled malingering.

Again, APFIP, I thank you. And chief labtician Sang also thanks you, as it is to him that the task of sorting and categorizing the spastically and unartfully-typed brayings falls. Every mailing electronique that arrives that is not one of the three curséd questions is one fewer spear thrust into his side.

When this missive was presented during our weekly "On the Roads" staff audio-tele-meeting, Vice-President Molly suggested and demanded that the letter be forwarded on to the Abbey of Deer or perhaps to those who dwell in the Land of Ann. There was even a plea to pass it along to the Savage Dan, the fearsome homosexual human known for his ferocity and fluidlust.

“Look, GS, you really should think about passing this along.” She did utter. “Abbey, Annie and Dan have way more experience than you in marriage counseling, and it sounds like this poor girl needs some good calm advice.” Molly’s voice tinned over the speakers of my Velocitation Suit as I strode amongst the rubble of New Orleans, helping where I could.

The gleaming chrome pylons that were the legs of my suit telescoped and found purchase as easily as a Mountain Frog scampers upon the stony cliffs of the barren surface world. Absently I piloted the craft amongst the debris, lifting sufferers to high ground, their shrieks of terror all the thanks I, as President, might require.

While I am, as my assistant Rob says, “doing that walking the Land like Kane from Kung-Fu shit” I have been taking weekly meetings with my advisors. They, like the best and brightest gathered at Arthur's Roundy-Table, sit in various locales, hunched in twos and threes over telecoummincators wired into the Gran National Tell-Your-Phone Network, or squeezing to their tiny monkey-ears tinny téléphones de cellulaire, and all of their sundry, ethereal communicative connections stitched together at a single switchboard and routed, via satellite, to my mobile auto-velocitiating suit, so that I might stay within touch of my staff whist I rediscover my roots in the communities of this fine and partially-submerged land.

“Arrogant Molly,” I bellowed, “Do you think I know nothing of marriage? Of relocation? Who amongst us has moved as far as I? Sacrificed as much for the sake of the Americanoe Peoples? My qualifications are vast, my resolve is firm. I shall probe this problem deeply and repeatedly until an answer screams forth.”

“Whatever.” Molly’s tonally flat voice became impossibly flatter, as if every vowel and consonant had been hammered from the same timbre. “They’re your voters, you’re only following a grand tradition by fucking them up more. Mandate,” and she spat a sight of air.

A slow, slurred voice chimed in, if a slow slurred thing could ever be said to chime. Perhaps it gonged in, “Heya, um, Lord A.," Rob's voice was distant and wavering, bounced as it was from Detroit cell-phone to White House switchboard to space-station dish to terrestrial Cajun Country signal repeater to me, in the fetid new salt marshes of the Big Easy. "Uhhh . . . I don’t think Molls means any disrespect or nuthin', just that this, with the ex and the rape accusations and shit, is some heavy fucking shit. This chick may have some real problems—like, either restraining-order problems or crazy-paranoid-delusions-needs-a-therapist problems. THis isn't just more dumbass questions about your dick or what kind of car you drive or whatever bullshit those kids ask. You dig what I'm gettin' at?”

Were they all set against me? What had been transpiring in Washingtonia Deca in my absence? “Et tu, Rob?" I did hiss, "Do you have a dagger set to my back?” In my anger, I fumbled the controls of the velocitator and drove a legging deep into the concrete below. For the moment, I was trapped.

"Dude, you're, like . . . symbiotical? Metric simile? I mean, do you, like, even have a back? Bein' all, like, round and cylindrical and shit? I mean . . . what with the . . . fuckin', whaddya call it?"

Piped through copper wires to clean, clear fiber optic cables and thence to the immensely bandwidthed satellite antenna, Molly's sigh was audible and crisp, "Radial symmetry, you numbnuts. He has radial symmetry."

"Yeah!" Rob gobbled through the garble, "Radial symmetry! Do you even have a back?"

"Indeed I do have a back, Rob, which I can well see that my staff do not guard or defend for me—and despite not having a spine or spinal column, it is certainly clear that I do have of the backbone. I shall answer this question myself. I have known loss. The human heart is known to me in its base, hungry simplicity. The couer itself will be my roadsmap to truth. That is all. Resume your duties and put away your sharpened knives, I shall not return to your nest of vipers soon, but when I do there shall be a reckoning. President Out." And thence I terminated the satellite connection.

So I have said, and so it shall be, APFIP.

Your chosen mate, the one who hath filled your loins with his writhing seed and that you have—perhaps unwisely—chosen to keep and shelter to your eggs, and thence carry those fertilized eggs to term within your own flesh, instead of depositing them in a gulley or pond to hatch and grow on their own and thereby learn firsthand and quickly of the fierceness of nature and of the cleverness and resourcefulness she demands of all of us every waking moment of our brief lives . .. this mate of yours has shown loyalty and love to the mates he previously rutted with. He has not devoured them. He has not abandoned them. Does he continue to rutt with them, to yet plow their fields several times tilled, to dip of the wick in another's pot of hot candle wax—Ahh, that does seem to be the Pachyderm within our Enclosure, now, does it not?

Clearly your mate cares for you, as he is abandoning his familiar locale and hunting ground to join you in territory unknown, possibly full of dangers. Are there many whales where you live? Parasitic infections? Small, roving militias? Weather anomalies with Levee crushing intentions? These are the questions in his heart. His love for you lives aside his fear of the guerillas and gorillas which may ambush him in this land. So what does your mate-to-be do? He brings along what he is familiar with, his children, his former mates, with their familiar and gooey crevices.

The fault here does not lie with your monkey-lover: he is simply a stranger in a stranger land. He shows love to those he loves now, and to those he loved prior. Where is the wrong in this? It is surely a sign of weakness, but a benign weakness unneedful of the surgical removal. If you were his exospouse—by which I presume you mean "the spouse without" and in contrast to yourself, the endospouse, or "spouse within"—would you not want to be treated the same by him, regardless of the fact that you then would be the less favored hide, already shucked off and discarded?

But what of his exomate? Her vicissitudes and remarks upon your character? What lies in her heart? Jealousy towards your beauty, your siren-like thrilling of her exohusbandito, jealousy which cascades within her like the rains ceaseless, which push the Waters of Disaffection higher and higher until, as I see clearly in the devastation that lies before my domed chassis, the levee does break, the cradle does fall, and down does come baby, e. coli and all. This exowife has lost all power over him and has no power over you save her harpy-ish commentary, and pity her lowly status as the spouse-without, the discarded husk of a helpmate.

Ignore her, as she is pitiable, and pity is the wasted, polluted seed of emotional onanism.

Or yet another idea tickles my brain sac: Show friendship and mock-pity to her. Be the larger mammal, and invite her into your home and warm fire hearth circle. Giver her and her spawnlings aid and succor and support, and offer her no fault in which to sink her feline-ish claws, so that she is left to scrabble on the impenetrable surface of your virtue, like the puppy on the tiled floor in his much comickal, but hopeless, attempts to change velocity in mid-glide. Then, as your trust grows stronger, and you become, in all but name and license, sister wives of this fantastical—and likely much over-rated—male, draw her closer to your breast, and with all your loving might thrust her into your hearth's cleansing fire, and let her burn like the common trash she so likely is.

But perhaps that last is a bit extreme; I am made to understand that many municipalities frown open murder-by-immolation, despite its noble pedigree. So, then, this is the heart of the heart of mine advice: Love your husband, be kind to his spawn and their mother(s) and any lovers he may previously have had. If this does not succeed as a plan, send more of your electronic mail to my doorstep and I shall pay her a presidential visit and we shall see if the tongue of a shrewish harpy is indeed sharper than my devouring maw.

With Regards and Admiration,
I Remain
Your President and
the Giant Squid