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Squid #122
(published February 20, 2003)
Notes From The Giant Squid: Wherefore is the Love?

Who is Poor Mojo's Giant Squid?
My dear readers, it pains me to observe that as these many years have progressed, there seem to be so few in this grand and terrible up-space who require the insight of and assistance from a willing and eager creature such as myself.

I have struggled with this problem lo these many months, and a simple anecdote will now I relate to you as realization mine.

It was onto a Friday night not many weeks past that I and several of the help-chimps of the lab, lead (and chauffeured) by lab assistant Rob, were off to the out-scape of the rural Detroit (I believe that Rob said it was called "Mishy-gun", but to this point I came unclear). And on this journey, following an advertisement in a local circular, eponymously titled Current, we progressed to the viewing of a digital video projecting upon the wall of schooling-place gymnasium.

I, in my slenderest Auto-velocitator, crabbed my way through the streets and into the darkened gymnasium wearing seventeen khaki London Fog brand rain cloaks stitched together lovingly by Mrs. Hsien. I was very proud of the disguise. After many months on the road with much-missed Tom, my lab assistant of yore that many might recall with a fondness, I feel and felt that I had become rather adept at impersonating a surface dweller, and when the administrator of the kinder-school glanced as we stumbled in late, I bowed the great glass dome of my velocitator so as to proffer to him to top of head-cap, as is the custom of many surface folk. His epidermis blanched three shades, and I took this to be a rather gentile welcoming.

We trundled in, and so long as the help-chimps and Robert made no move to comment on my size, it seemed that all who were there ahead of us were willing to accept it as such.

(I should note at this moment that the help chimps to which I refer are, in fact, chimps proper. It is on occasion that I derisively refer to the humans of the world as "naught but chimps and apes", and while this is true so far as it shall be, I should note that in this case Rob had made many friends with the troupe of genetically altered chimpanzee that Devo employs in his garage and laboratory alongside the more normal riff-to-raf. I should also note that the chimps were not engineered by myself or by Devo— Ha! the very notion of Devo engineering in meat rather than steel and tin tickles me to pinkward— but rather Devo had acquired them through contacts in the Vietnamese Catholic community of the Grandure Rapids. The chimps, I have been told, were gathered as a troupe together sometime in the late 1970s by a group of Belgian investors who hoped to put into practice certain recently— at the time —uncovered medical records from a scientist working in the Congo during the dark post-war period of the mid-Century. The immediate and relevant consequence of this is that all of the chimps, while generally amiable, speak only halting French and so need to be coaxed slowly into most things.)

Regardless, this is all upon the gunwale of things. What was of import was the film being projected at this affair was the Indian Jones and Crusade Finale, or some such matter (again, a lot of the gist of action was lost to me because the chimps occasionally demanded, in their broken longshoreperson's French, to have me or one of the others translate this or that bit to them. Some moments that I was able to relay to them are clear as crystal to me, while others which progressed during these periods of translation are less so, as I was preoccupied with simian antics).

It seems, then, in short, that one Indian Jones of Mexico is a scamperer upon the dirt in search of women his father has slept with, and that there are German soldiers also involved with women that his father has endeavored to impregnate and miraculously, it seems, geese are afraid of umbrellas— which matter I demanded that Rob note for further use, and which he seemed having difficulty understanding. He is an adorable but ultimately bizarre man. Ofttimes I take a great notion that the troupe leader of the chimps is easier to communicate with.

But to my point, ultimate. In the gondola of that great dirigible, when Indian Jones and his sexually profligate father (a man decidedly familiar to me, though I know not from where . . . a man who vaguely evokes a sense of danger in me) . . . when he and this patriarch are alone upon the eating floor of the dirigible's gondola and the Not-see men are searching the plane for parking violations, they have what is apparently an attempted heart-toward-heart discussion.

And it was hearts rending to me as I saw it flickering and pixelated upon the bare white brick of the gymnasium wall. I recalled well the times that I and my father worked toward communication, and mainly the ways in which we failed. Disputes arose over hunting technique and over the proper way to assault a female so that she will be equal parts stimulated and terrified . . .

And I pause now, for some reason this also seems to remind of where I have seen the Indian Jones Father before . . . but no matter.

I understood as they stared at each other.

"We never talked when I was kid," the Indian Jones says to his genetic progenitor.

"Well," I recall the father replied . . . recall because I had to translate it to one of the less intellectually agile of the chimps, "Here to we are now and alone. Of what should we speak?"

And there was a tremendous pause as the Indian Jones looked into his glass of alcoholic liquid. "I cannot recall of a single thing," said The Indian Jones.

Ah, how poignant indeed.

Can you not, dear readers, know that you are faced with me who you have all these years pined for, now imagine what on earth you might ask? We can talk of anything you like. Please. To anything you might ask I shall answer.

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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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