Lately I have been wandering do you sometimes wish you were just a normal person? Also if you were a regular person what group of people would you be in?

Unsigned

Dearest Anonymous Petitioner,

There was a time, not very far in the past at all, when I would have laughed derisively into the face of your question. Once my chortles had subsided — or, depending on the volume of my contempt, perhaps following my forceful cessation of such guffaws — I would then have abrasively upbraided you until your braids were thoroughly frayed, pelting you with a withering fusillade of epithets and noms d' douleur — gruntmonkey, humpchimp, mudslumping recto-cololinguist, et cetera — afore imperiously casting you away from ever again polluting the sight of my optically perfect eyes. Then, fugueish with the sound drubbing you had just weathered, you would think unto yourself, "Not so terrible, was that. Not fatal, certainly. Though ignorant in the extreme, unattractive physically, and morally repugnant in my pathetic, half-formed existence, I shall live to fight another day, and darken other doors with my stoooopid queries." And, in the darkness after your trouncing, I would chuckle again. That night would chimps, razors in hand, be deployed to your places of work, recreation, and respite, whilst I set to forging ersatz MySpace identities with which to befriend and ultimately betray you. Likewise, I would make of the telephonic "calls", offering the tips to your local constabulary and vigilant organizations so as to inform them of your fondness for taking pictures of yourself sexually molesting immature trees and e-mailing such photographic studies to clergypersons and impressionable Congressfolk. I would then taint your water supply, harrow your business associates and loved ones, shrink your garments within the hot-water wash, salt your fields, and load your comestibles with ample hydrogenated oils and high-fructose corn syrups.

Vengeance was always mine, and was always complete. Even "excessive and badly overwritten," or so said the critics (afore they found themselves unemployed on the MySpace sex offender registry, fields barren, waters poisoned, and thorax choked with fatty-fatty-fat fat deposits.

In those glorious, vengeful days past, my dear Anonymous Friend, even your namelessness could not protect you from the hammer of my wrath should you, for one solitary moment, even begin to imagine considering the possibility of implying the intimation that my state — whatever it may be, lauded or degraded, solitary or befouled with countless friends — to be less than the most desirable imaginable of all possible states of affairs.

But, much water has passed over many bridges since those days, and in subsequent years I have softened somewhat on this issue.

Today, my answer is a humble, Yes, often.

As I float, lonely as a cloud, in the glorious solitude of my salt tank, within the darkened confines of my nighttime, vacation-season lab, high atop the 74th floor of this Centre du Renaissance of Detroitus, Michiganium, I oft consider the possibility of being a "normal person." I gaze down upon the automobiles, nigh unto one-thousand feet below the lazy, pointless undulations of my own flesh-rending tentacles. I watch the automobiles of the "normal persons" slip silently through the concrete-and-asphalt orb-weaver's web of the city. Now, in the season of the Mass of the Death Conquering Baby, I do feel my estrangement most completely. Is there a tree in my domicile? Yes; it is a ficus tree, and it is dusty and neglected. Is it be-tinseled and lightstrung? Not at all. Do gifts hide beneath its twiggy boughs, cowering at the thought of their upcoming dismemberment? No. Has it been lit aflame for eight nights, only to be restored unconsumed — Slidrugtanni-style — with the coming of the next morn? No.

What even the poorest CFO possesses, I do lack. My state, as an abnormal person, is pitiable.

As for to what group of regular folk I do crave membership, I would like much to be a family man, with pipe clenched in my beak, slippers upon my tentacles, and a newspaper held before my eyes whilst I carve of the Xmas Turdogducken, my entire mishpuchah slavering about the jowls in anticipation, and the visage of our terrible, shadowy Mother Bride brooding above us, waiting to reave her share in her chosen moment.

Much like and unto the other Family Men of note — such luminaries as Mike of the Bradies and the Ward of the Cleaver — I would be with my family by night, dispensing of the wisdom and guidance, and by day, my occupation would be shadowy. I imagine I would join Mike and the Ward in their vocation: manning the levers in the esoteric, occult cabal that invokes the holy day golem of this season, the innumerable Santos Clausen. I watch these earthly emissaries of Santería's voodoo energies, ubiquitous, and clangingly invisible. Even from the overlofty vantage of my lab, I can see clearly their subtle, stumbling progress through the city, red corpuscles coursing through the burgh's winter-white arteries and slush-black veins. By day, they are zombies, clanging of their bells relentless, gathering funds in dribs and drabs, tireless. Then, by night, their nature shifts vampiric, as they smokedriftingly slip into personal homes, invited and goaded by milk cookie bribery and notes of invitation, to work their own eldritch, unintelligible, clandestine havoc. One would suspect that they sop of the vital energies and fluids of the occupants, but such a thing is unknowable from my vantage.

These men, they are the regular group of normal persons who I would, in this holiday season, most gladly count myself among.

Yet, Sadly I Remain,
Your Giant Squid