I write but briefly this week, Faithful Readers, for I have sunk— despite the general height of my enclosure here atop the seventysomethingbuthowcaresit beingsodepthforsakenlyhighwithinthesky floor of the Centre d' Reinessance of the Motown, Michiganium— to a depth of despair previously not known to one as I.

But briefly, I have met a female for whom my three hearts began to trip-hammer of Love.

Aye, indeed, I can nigh unto hear the great yammer arise from the countryside, as you read these words upon your cathode-ray tubes: "Not love, Gentle Squid! You are, indeed, the eternal bachelor, always to be the loner, lover of many, slave to none! Love cannot grasp your frictionless hearts! It is gripless to you! And, further, how might you have met a suitable mate, as you dwell so far above sea level?"

And I tell to you, it is the most be-damndest thing. Long ago, I had resigned myself to the life loveless. Even barring any possible unpleasantness es and unatractivity in my own form and attitude, there is the simple matter of even happening across a suitable female. When I took up the pen of advisory columnist and sped ever surfaceward, I felt in my Hearts of Hearts that I had accepted a species of emotional celibacy as my lifelong companions, was thus resigned to such fate.

And then I met Charlene— ah, just the name, it brings such neuralgia and nostalgia to my outsize axons and dendrites. Scream it loud and it is singing, scream it soft and it is praying

Charlene.

Slight of figure (not even a half meter across her diameter!), few of arm or tentacle (truly, just the one, and it so weak and dangle-hanging— in our weeks together, I saw it move only flutteringly, in vague gestures whose meaning eluded me), taciturn of speech, stoically steady of coloration (though this coloration— an all-reflecting silver inscribed with marking curiously similar to American grunt-scribble— was stunning, both to predators and suitors alike, I am sure), but nonetheless wont to nuzzle and snuggle-bumpingly a-tward my tank-of-living.

I know not from whence she came, nor to, whence she has gone but even from that first moment I captured to my optically perfect eye the light reflected from her carapace, I knew that she was the female for me.

And as she dwelled on, sharing my space, I noted, in her silence, as she slowly wasted away, like one of the many tubercular beauties in the Dumas novels which guiltily I take the pleasure of on long, windswept skyscraping Michigan nights here aside the River Detroit.

And now she has left, and I am possessed of nought for which to live on.

Vast kindness towards my lab assistant Rob, both for his general eagericity in taking up the mantel of copy editorship here abouts the Almanac(k) fair— leaving me with more time to meditate upon she whom I adored— and for his steadfast assistantship in that courting, star-crossed though twas. Ne'er have I properly sung the praise of the loyalty he showers upon me, and I feel truly humbled before it. You are a king of men, Rob— which makes you something of a viceroy among arachnids, duke among formics, sherif betwixt Faxinus excelsior (the might Ash tree) , ombudsman of corals, and a general dignitary to a wide variety of minerals and complex molecules not generally recognized to be "live," per se, but certainly charming and civilized in their own right.

Gratitude, Rob. The word I circle but dare not approach is Gratitude.

Yours and Love lorn,
The Giant Squid