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Squid #174
(published April 8, 2004)
Notes from the Giant Squid: The Things I Now

Who is Poor Mojo's Giant Squid?
dear giant squid,

Do you now anything.

unsigned


Dear Readers:

Above is accurately and precisely transcribed the query du jour exactly as she came to me across the ether eletronique.

Do I "now" anything?

Interesting, a simple query, and yet, no sooner than snagged, she arches her back and slips from the grip, a marlin of rare device. That "now", at first I took her to intend to be a modifier of words, as is her traditional role, and I wonder solely "Do I now what? Do now sleep? Do I now dream? Do I now regret? Do I now rage?".

I thought much on the verbs that might be drawn into this interrogatives web, the positions they might take, the questions they might then form of what I now do or feel or think or wish or loath or need or wistfully, subtly, almost imperceptibly wish might be.

And then, in a moment of strange and terrible lucidity, I saw that the "now", she was the verb herself, disguised as like a modifier. The questions was of what I might be nowing.

Nowing.

The immediacy rolls forth and away from the notion, like the great and shimmering rings that loop out from the impact-point of an atomique bomb dropped within Ye Olde Bikini Atoll: There is a splash— remarkably little, then silence, then a great in-drawing of the world and compression and then the burst outward, the very material of the world straining to go forever beyond itself, to ever expand, and the rings build and build and the water grows to roaring and rageful mountain, flesh vaporously to the sky, and the ripple propagates to the very edges of the world— which, as a sphere, can only mean that they propagate around and back again, to collapse, loverlike, into their own arms. And everything, everything, everything is much changéd.

Do I now anything?

Do I then anything?

Did I then anything?

Will I have been thus nowing then?

Let me to the focus come, the feeling and sensation, she flows freely in the tank like the fear of a bull dog churning her legs upward for the last time, like the still moment after the Little Fat Atomique Garçon strikes of the water, dives deep and takes his one mighty breath be for becoming.

The present; is she at all what she once was?

There is sunlight cascading through the murk of my tank, for I have allowed the polymer shading in my exterior glass to go translucent on this occasion of the coming Springing Time season, a season of love and rabbits and scourging, of slaughtered lambs and blood painting and eating of the bitter herbs. It is a season of wine flowing as wine, of chocolate comestibles brought by either sinister and intelligent housebreaking Lepus europaeus, or sentient bells, or childrearers for their kin and kind. The children, first born, must die again and again. It is, as the name must imply, a time of the Time itself Springing Forth and Forward without warning and thus causing vexsome delay in my staff's Sunday morning arrival. And, logically, it must be a time of Springing Forth ourselves, for it is clearly a time of slaughter. Or so it is to hear Rob squawk of the doings of the week— as is ever the case, much of his gruntutterance lacks of the clarity.

The pressure makes for to crush the bulldog in my tank, who was once called "Little Leo," but is now only called "Break-the-Fast." A tiny forerunner of blood does leak from his nose, a thread in my waters, and snakes down, out, reminding me of the worms, ululating and meditative, who lived at the bottom of the center— the epicenter— of the Bikini Atoll, when the earth was young, even before the atomique was made forceful upon the world once, twice, thrice. Far before the Now that I am now nowing. Break-the-Fast works his stubbish legs tirelessly, frantically, straining for the surface that does not exist, for the liberation and life's-air that is not possible to attain. The light is golden and straining about his form, and he does glow.

I can know not, but perhaps this pup now dog soon meal was the only pup of his litter— unlikely, but possible— an only son my own meal. Statistically, it is quiet likely the case— between a 16% and 25% chance— that he was the firstmost born. A first born to slaughter.

These is all things I now.

The now is sunlight, and burning bodies, and policemen in prayer, and space-time herself slipping and pulling, and botulin toxins, and dancing robots, and screaming, and massages, and baseballs, and old movies of the New Wave, as once it was an Old Wave made now, coursing out from Bikini's Atoll to wrap its new and neutron-enriched embrace about the world, as even more nowishly I now my bulldog Break-the-Fast, I course in for the embracing kill, the slaughter of sons . . .

The now is many little things.

And already it is the then, passed, the once was, the meal completed.

Can any of us now? I do think in some moments I must now for too much of my time, and risk becoming, as the Rabbi's warn, lost to thought, and thus myself alien to the world, and thus to the sui caedere, the self-slaughter. As I make me, Cartesian, of my own thoughts, would I not be my only begotten son? Now that is? In this now that I now? It drives me to something like a madness, and a fear of things as they are, for they shall never become, and they shall never once were, they are always as they are, and the now . . .

It is here among us like a stalking thing, her legs desperate in churning the waters, the rings of the impact of her coming embrace coursing out across the face of the waters.

And so, ha ha, my member is long and full of girth, and there is rutting, and look to Rob, he gambols and prances, and manipulates his "Little Man" . . .

Ha ha!

Ha.

Sigh.

I shall shuffle my hunting arms about, the cups dancing through the water, one contains a bright red ball, the others empty, the cups spin and intertwine, and which one has the red ball, who dances and gambols, Robbish, in the sun's light caught in the embrace of my tank's water? Where has the red ball gone? Where has it gone now? What cute, Small Reader, what Little Man, what first and only begotten son of mine shall point to the lucky cup?

There it is. I offer you the Winning Cup, the chosen cup, the first and foremost cup, for in it, congealed, is a sphere of canine blood, pressed into a pliable goo by the intense and crushing force of the water of my tank.

Watch it float now in my waters, still and inbreathed as the waters at the core of Bikini's Atoll in the moment prior to the Fat Little Man Boy's entrance. Watch it float in my waters unturbulent, disturbless, as though no dog ever here was, struggling up to the impossible tree of free air. This blood, she could be my wine. The cup that it just this past moment released, could be no more substantial than bread unleavened. Watch the bead of blood, the profit of slaughter float. See her now, with all your mind's imperfect eye. Blood in the waters. Now.

It is what you wanted, yes? Blood and rage, slaughter and sacrifice, ill-fated and vein struggle, the bursting crush if hydrogen's auto-erotic embrace, the Springing Time, Now.

We have all received what we most wanted in this world. It is here among us.

Like a stalking thing.

I Remain,
Your Giant Squid

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