Oh dear Great One, might you part the seas with your infinite wisdom once more? I have reasonable suspicions that my newly divorced and unemployed sister has become frightfully delusional. She spends her days doing nothing but researching sniper personality traits and staring into the wooded black for hours in one standing. I have also observed that it has become her nightly ritual to retreat from the cemetery adjacent to her home, expressionless and marked with insect bites. For now, I awkwardly attempt to mask my concern for her unsubstantiated ravings, though I find her to be a lunatic, no longer capable of logical processes. If only I could simply devour her and her offspring, as you might, and save them a doomed existence. Juggernaut of the deep, our genetic divide may be great, but not as expansive as your interpretive prowess.

Shine your bright light unto this wretched soul.

---

Dear Anonymous Petitioner,

Let me begin by issuing a hale and hearty greeting to my vast and insatiable readership. I am delighted to be once again perched atop my glass and steel tower beside the River of Detroit — no longer damned to wander the surface in my tiresome and fetid environmental suit. I am sure you are equally delighted to once again receive the full dram of my wisdom in this, our weekly monitor-side tête-à-tête. Yet it is still more than a hair's-breadth queer to again be in my lab, as it has been so strangely changed in its occupation by the nefarious Sang. Many items have been moved from their appointed locations, and much of my equipment is gone missing, including my water-tight, pressurized computer-terminal. I am, in fact, obliged to dictate this to a school boy whom I pay a nominal fee.

[yo. i'm jarwaun & i'm typin for mr. squid for eight $ a hour]

My erstwhile assistant Rob, who has been missing since the end of our last adventure, once described such a feeling as "like wearin' chick underwear." I pondered long on this, and came to the conclusion that Rob's analogy hinged upon the fact that, in the case of female-designed undergarments, the function is largely the same — achieving genital safely via fabric ensconcement — but the form is slightly different, in that the fabric is of an alien, silky quality. Thus, rather than comforting and protecting, the "chick under where" titillates and distracts: All is as it is meant to be, but all is not right.

I have neither external genitalia nor underwear in which to wrap them, and thus must trust Rob's assessment in this as being the apotheosis of "queer and unsettling." He has rarely been misinformative, my precocious man servant.

My lab, she wears the chick's underwear for the time being, and I am disturbed.

But, to the point of this request:

Often, when we hold ourselves up to comparison with our Betters, we see the girth of their accomplishments, and the abyssal chasm betwixt That Which I Am and That Which I Might Be yawns wide. Consider the deep water sea spider — simple folk, not nearly so cosmopolitan as many of his co-species — looking up from the depths of the Mariana Trench to see the friscillating glimmer of the Indiglo™ wrist-mounted chronometers of cast-away seamen being assailed by callow and happy-to-go-lucky tiger sharks.

"Up there, so very close to the Silver Line and the searing Upspace; I could never devour a sailor," he sighs.

And it is true. That spindly, scrawny deep sea spider could never come within a half-dozen fathoms of the surface without causing his thin carapace to breach with the lessening pressure. Further, his tiny mandibles and unrazoréd claws could not hope to pierce the skin of a hearty sailor.

But is all lost? Shall our hayseed country sea spider never know the joy of the savor of the flesh of man?

Far from it, my Anonymous Loquacious Interlocutor. Far from it. It is certainly the case that our deep sea spider will never slip the surly bonds of his trench to drift Upward, nor will his scrawny mandibulae cut fresh man-flesh, but as the remnants of those corpses drift floor-ward through the tenderizing salt water of our Mother Ocean, let none doubt that the patient and sagacious sea spider, the watchful and attentive sea spider, shall have his seamen supper.

As such, I am baffled and disappointed that one so admiring of my Great and Terrible Works might presume to be incapable of following in my ink trail. Yes, your eyes are optically imperfect; your limbs puny, short and few; your brain several kilos to light; and your teeth far from razor sharp, but, like the little old sea spider, you must retain the High Hopes!

First, slaughter your sister and her children in any manner you deem fit. Be aware that suffocation via carbon monoxide or other chemical means of expiration will discolor their meats, and likely render them either unpalatable or inedible. Owing to their varied diets of the "junk food", humans cannot be consider "kosher" or "halal," regardless of the method of slaughter.

Your sister and her brood should be butchered into 2 or 3 pound boneless roasts. Discard all internal organs. Be wary of metallic piercings. As humans live "free range," they are generally stringy and gamey, which is why I advise braising in a sweet sauce. My own favorite recipe follows, and should be added after the meat has been seared (Note Well: Afore braising, please rub roasts with salt and pepper to taste.)

For each 2 pounds of meat combine:

• the juice of one orange
• one-and-one-half cups sweet red wine
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 tablespoon garlic

Please be aware that consuming rare or undercooked human meat and eggs can result in the contracting of unpleasant gastrointestinal pathogens or gnawing brainworms. Additionally, many humans eat a great deal of corn and the corn's syrup, leading them to be high in trans fatty acids. A diet rich in these toxins results in diseases of the heart, sexual dysfunction, paranoia, and a lack of concern for the matters of Global Climate Collapse.

I Remain,
Your Giant Squid

Post-Scriptorum: if you should happen upon my assistant and comrade Rob, please request he contact me post haste, as I am concerned for the fate of the very expensive and fanciful velocitation suit in which he was last seen floating downriver. Also, I am somewhat curious as to his current physical health and well-being.

Post-Post-Scriptorum: I neglected to speak of the marrow! Do not neglect to retain the bones of your sister and neph-kins, for to boil with the vegetables into a rich, fatty stock. Such a delight shall surely warm the cockles of your heart and crenelated cavities of your gullet on some cold winter night, should a cold winter night ever again occur.