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Squid #82
(published Early, 2002)
Ask The Giant Squid: To Everything, Twirl Twirl Twirl, There is a Season, Twirl Twirl

Who is Poor Mojo's Giant Squid?
Dearest Lord of the Deep,

Apparently you misunderstood my initial intent on helping you recapture the kingdom which is earth and return it to its rightful place under the ocean. How, truly, can you say that I, of all people, would try to fool you? Surely you jest Great Master of the Water, if there is any of my species who hates us more than any other race it is I, sir, it is I. In saying this I will repeat my previous question. How, your excellency, can I help in your quest to return the human race to the sea?

Your most trusted minion,
Benjamin Jeffrey Bestic
Lowellville, OH


Benjamin Beastie!,

I delight to receive word from you a second time! So often my correspondents and I, we pass as the two ships within the night which did not collide. I hear little of how my advice is born out in the world.

Upon this new review of our past corresponding — having learned much of the ways of your culture and nation— I now meditate upon my misunderstanding. What I took to be a guillful ruse was, truly, an honest offering-of-the-hand-helping.

This, truly, in my terrible mind inspires wonder: I remain a Giant Squid— your once and future Architeuthis dux— and yet I am by no means the Squid I was oh so many years ago when I first hunt-and-pecked my earliest columns out in crude Morse code, to be transcribed by none other than Captain Mojo himself. Nor am I the low, mournful beast that grew into the rageful beast that treated dear, dear Tom— of blessed memory— so abysmally . Even now I find that, within my hearts (by which I mean, of course, within the empathic compartments of my vast brains) I begin to develop an emotion, somewhere beyond the plane defined by pity, loathing and derision, inspired by your charming, if rustic, species.

This fascinates me greatly, for although in the moment-to-moment I feel no change— the Giant Squid being a thing eternal, the A. dux of 9:03 am being the self-same as the A. dux of 9:04 am— and yet, in less than 18 lunar months I can see clearly demonstrated great, nigh unto tectonic, shifts in my discourse. These shifts are not just to style (which all would rightly reason will change in great in quivering modes as the English-as-a-Second-Language grunter progress through various stages of linguistic acquisition and mastery), but also to the content. Have I gone softer? Or subtler? At some point, while my mind was on other tasks, I have begun to develop a rapport with humankind, bizarre though this sounds.

Just as no single man-monkey-grunt-thing felt— not even an iota of feeling— of the subtle, catastrophic shifts in his form which evolution wrote, so too has my mindpart been evolved, right beneath my beak, as they say.

It is clear, in review, that my mind has changed. My mind, my glorious mind, that encompasses all and every— it is this thing of grandeur which has itself shifted and molded, Benjamin Beastie. And I felt it naught. If the pressure of my tank shifts by just .15 of an atmosphere, this I feel and note and bemoan, but my mind has made a sea-change complete, like the waters of Bikini Atoll each day-interval, and this I felt not at all until I read your latest missive.

Strange, marvelous strange. I scarcely know what to think. It is truly the case that evolution, like the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, creeps into us on the kittens-feet, delicate, delicious and silent.

And again, like the kind, my mind worries a single tuft of string loosed from the upholstery of my complacency, and that is this nature of my mind-change, my evolution: I have begun to feel compassion for you grunt-sorts; an honest urge to help and guide you has welled within me, like the sprigget of black golden Texas tea oil that liberated Jed Clampett from his toothless, Ozark fate and catapulted he and his fellow hillbillies Beverly-Hillsward.

Nonetheless, despite it all, I still yearn for a water-ensconced planet. To this end, I hope you have heard of a little project called The Warming Global. In conjunction with the land cows, a loose coalition of forwardthinking marine creatures (including some mammals who shall remain nameless, believe it or do not), and the Rand Corporation, we seek to raise the global temperature several degrees so as to melt the polaires calottes glaciaires, thus giving the oceans their all-too-dearly needed boost.

How can you, but a man, lend aid to this colossal experiment in weather control? It is a simple matter: now is the time for all good men to use your sprays of the hair, dispose of your refrigerating boxes in flagrant disregard of the advice of your local refuse handlers viz. freon, develop a culture highly reliant upon the power of burning coil and bitumine and the crafts of plastics, drive at great speeds in your petrol guzzling steel coffins, and feed your cow-comrades great servings of beans, so their methanic expulsions might thicken the air greenhousishly.

Changed and Yet the Same,
Your Giant Squid

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see other pieces by this author | Who is Poor Mojo's Giant Squid? Read his blog posts and enjoy his anthem (and the post-ironic mid-1990s Japanese cover of same)

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