Why are guys such assholes? I mean, I want a nice guy, someone that rawks my world, but all I seem to find is assholes.

Anonymous

I was of the evening last crumpled in the grassy lot adjacent to the non-mobile living conveyance where I and mine companion The Hazel do reside when this Girl-of-Wonder did saunter down the rotting wood-sinew steps at the back of the door.

I squatted upon the turf. (As an aside, I have discovered the crude, ephemeral pleasure of the squat now that I spend my time entirely encased in the great and terrible titanium auto-velocitating hard-shell made in my glorious past days as the proud owner of an assorted variety of scientifically inclined business and research enterprises. Now that I am much of your terrible dry Upspace, I have come to appreciate the contours and flexing of my physical form as it relates to gravity. And so, like a spider, or a feces emitting monkey, I do squat often in the grassy, sometimes concreted, open spaces about the Shady of the Pines Mobile Conveyance Living Park, the central pod of my hard-shell hanging low amongst my assorted metal-enclosed limbs, the force of gravity pulling me down toward the core of the earth, and the fiery mysteries there-in.)

And so, while squatting as such, my compact central form swaying in the twilight, watching the cold early spring wind rustle the needles of the many piney trees which surround the park shadily, I was approached by Hazel.

She held before her a sheet of thin paper, the text printed in purple.

She plopped of the down, releasing her full and lounge-panted bottom to gravity's base urges, and leant back against one of my hunting tentacles. With her left hand, she held the paper to the glass of my anti-bathysphere.

"We're outta black ink in the HP, Shuge," she said casually, looking up into the sky. Her voices is soft about the edges, worn smooth by the ceaseless winds of her native Lincoln's Nebraska, I imagine—and very different from my old lab assistant, Rob, with his coarsely aggressive nasal curses and ramblings. It is the soothinger, without a doubt, but still I do yet miss Rob, and wonder for where he has hidden himself, and why.

And there, in the evening, I did read your query.

The sun set, its light silhouetting a tangled array of broken antennae which sprouted from many and several of the other non-mobile living conveyances that were scatted about the park.

I considered the document.

Finally, Hazel drew the paper down into her lap and she considered it as well.

"Is it because the men are inverted, perhaps?" I queried young Hazel, who cocked her head to one side. She frowned.

She sighed. "Nah . . ."

"Is it more of the extended interpretation of their nature, these men, that they are all but bilaterally symmetric tubes, and so, in truth, the orifice at one end is but an extension of the other, the bottom indivisible from the top, a living expression of the Paradox of Xeno?"

She slid casually from my limb, letting her hair fan out behind her head, a fading auburn halo in the cold grass. "Maybe, but . . . not really," she sighed.

She had a distant look in her eye as she reviewed a great and unknown depth of experience.

"Topologically speaking," I opined, "a man is the same, then, as a doughnut-snack or coffee-cup-with-handle, as each of the three is pierced but once."

Then there was the screeching sound of tires drawing a motorized vehicle to a stop.

Out leapt a thin boy. He vaulted the hood of his car, bounding up the heavy cement steps at the door of a green and teal aluminum living pod across the crumbling tarmac separating we Shady Piners domicilios from each other.

"Angie!" He bellowed, beating on the door. "Dammit, bitch, open the fucking door!"

A small woman, smaller even than my wispy compadre Hazel, swung open the door. "Randy, you goddamn crooked dick, what the fuck do you want from me?"

He yanked open the door and grabbed at her arm, but she swung around and pushed him and he fell from the concrete platform into the dirt. He rolled across the rocks and leapt back up, a scrape running the length of his left fore-paw.

"You don't know a damn thing, bitch!" He swayed as he stood, and inspected the wound.

"I don't ever want to see you again, Randy," she crossed her arms and looked down at him from the doorway. Behind her, a shirtless male hovered in the gloom.

"Hey, Randy, man, just leave it be," the male intoned seriously, but quietly.

"Angie, baby, you don't understand . . ." Randy pleaded.

The Angie sighed.

The Randy barked and pounded on the off-white hood of his otherwise matte-blackened vehicle.

"Listen, man," the male in the door stepped around The Angie and held out a hand palm forward, fingers slightly splayed. "Listen . . ." he held the hand out. "Listen..."

"Fuck you!" The Randy yelled, laying down upon the hood of his conveyance. "Angie, please . . ."

The Angie turned and stormed into the non-mobile aluminum living conveyance. She peered out from behind her new male.

The Randy barked again, slammed his door, backed away in the vehicle, and then made the peeling-out when he came to the auto trail, leaving skids of black rubber in his wake.

At this Angie cried, sitting upon the steps.

The new male looked down at her, crossing his own arms over his shirtless breast.

As quietly as before he said, "It's your own damn fault," his eyes gleamed as he considered Angie's seated form. Then he shook his head, "You're not a bitch, but you are a fool," and walked back into the trailing box.

Angie hung her head.

Hazel and I took in the scene. The sun had entirely set away beyond the horizon, and the scene was illuminated by a single bulb, itself stimulated with electrically current which thrilled its gassy filling to incandescence.

Hazel then rose and trotted across the lot. She sat beside the Angie and occasionally, without uttering any sounds or emitting any detectable communicative pheromones or illuminating any chromataphoric flesh, she was able to convey some meaningfully calming data to The Angie. And she rubbed of her back occasionally. Perhaps it was this rubbing? I know not. Years and years I am here among you all, and yet still I know little more than nothing at all.

And The Angie wept until the tears, they were gone, and she was dry and saltless.

Later, that night, as The Hazel lay in her bed and I crouched beneath the auto-port with my eye to the window of her bedroom, Hazel rolled to her side and looked at me through the glass. She put her hand upon the glass and told me the answer to your query.

Anonymous interlocutor: The men are mostly just the assholes, rough beasts little good to themselves or others, dogs without leashes and asses with no yokes, a swinging fist with no brain to guide it, a rage with no heart to contain it. There is no explaining it, and there is no use in expending of the energy to wonder why.

"Shall I then euthanize poor Randy and his ilk," I asked, my triple-hearts full of the pity for man and his kind, "As one might for rabid dogs, or for the suffering besickéd elderly in a doomed city?"

"Oh, Hon," she shook her head sadly, "What's the sense? You'd just as soon box with the Moon. Don't let the world make you crazy. Some things you can't fix."

That night I crouched in our yard and looked up at the glowering, leering grin of your gibbous Moon.

I know the Moon, know she is little wider in diameter than the lost continent of Australia, know that she is but 240,000 miles away—less than half the total miles I have travelled in my great and ceaseless lifetime.

Perhaps I now find myself in low circumstances, but nothing is beyond the grasp of a determined soul.

Yours,
The Giant Squid