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Squid #182
(published June 17, 2004)
Notes from the Giant Squid: We Send Our Prayers to You, Bates Alan.

Who is Poor Mojo's Giant Squid?
From: MRBATESALANN@netscape.net
Subject: REPLY SOON
Date: March 12, 2004 6:55:01 PM EST
To: editors@poormojo.org

Dear Friend,

As you read this, I don't want you to feel sorry for me, because, I believe everyone will die someday. My name is BATES ALAN a merchant in Dubai, in the U.A.E.I have been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer. It has defiled all forms of medical treatment, and right now I have only about a few months to live, according to medical experts. I have not particularly lived my life so well, as I never really cared for anyone (not even myself) but my business. Though I am very rich, I was never generous, I was always hostile to people and only focused on my business as that was the only thing I cared for. But now I regret all this as I now know that there is more to life than just wanting to have or make all the money in the world. I believe when God gives me a second chance to come to this world I would live my life a different way from how I have lived it. Now that God has called me, I have willed and given most of my property and assets to my immediate and extended family members as well as a few close friends. I want God to be merciful to me and accept my soul so, I have decided to give alms to charity organizations, as I want this to be one of the last good deeds I do on earth. So far, I have distributed money to some charity organizations in the U.A.E, Algeria and Malaysia. Now that my health has deteriorated so badly, I cannot do this myself anymore. I once asked members of my family to close one of my accounts and distribute the money which I have there to charity organization in Bulgaria and Pakistan, they refused and kept the money to themselves. Hence, I do not trust them anymore, as they seem not to be contended with what I have left for them. The last of my money which no one knows of is the huge cash deposit of eighteen million dollars $18,000,000,00 that I have with a finance/Security Company abroad. I will want you to help me collect this deposit and dispatched it to charity organizations. I have set aside 10% for you and for your time.

God be with you.

BATES ALAN


Bates Alan,

For the very love of your Merciful God, it is matters such as this that much epitomize why I so very badly need the direct access of my epistles electronique rather than my current execrable state of affairs, in which, though possessed I am of a much ruggedized and water-pressure-resisting keying board for the ten-tentacle typing, I lack altogether the computer monitoring device, and must rely on either my lab assistant, Rob, to print and present pertinent information to me from that World Wide Datasilknet or, alternately, must oblige to hold up for my viewing his own cathode ray tube box, so that I might see what I see. As such, matters they do slip betwixt the cracks with a frequency which concerns and astounds, largely owing to the fact that, despite my vociferous and common indication to the contrary, Rob insists on exerting his own editorial will over that which I receive and of which I am made aware.

Being entirely French in the matter, this habit of his has made me much of the angry.

"Marching 12, Rob!" I did shout just this yestermorn, my external speakers making booming acoustic Cavitations in the thick sea water of my tank home.

"Wha?" Rob asked, bleary-eyed, as he bound into my sancta squidtorum, returned from his four-and-twenty smoking break, "What the fuck are you shouting?"

I waved of the waterlogged paper sheets, imprints of a sheath of courrier électroniques of which I had been kept in ignorance. "Marching 12! This e-missive is dated of the Marching 12, and already it is Juno the 16, and only now have I been made to receive this."

"What are those?"

I waved of the smearing, disintegrating sheets with more vigor. "These, Rob, are the electromails you do not want for me to see, the messages you work so very assiduously to conceal from your fair Lord Architeuthis. Knew you not that I had separately contracted with Barnabus to retrieve all of my mailings, and print them, and deliver them unto me. The worm, she has most certainly turned, my dear Rob."

"Conceal? I haven't concealed shit, Lord A. What the fuck are you on about?"

"This," I veritably shouted, pressing one leaf to the glass of my tank, "and this! And these!"

Rob squinted at the blurry and besotted avalanche of evidence presented him.

"Dude, this is all junk. I was—"

"I, Rob, I shall be the arbiter of what is and what is not the junks. Perhaps to you these are the rubbish garbages, but to me each is a precious squirt of contact from my vast and admiring hordes. What know you of what is of utility to me? What if I were to desire of the larger male member? Of the viagras? Of the lowered interest on my mortgage—"

"— you don't have a mortgage; you live in a big fish tank—"

"Silence! If I might choose to decide to purchase of the inking cartridges, to contract termed life insurance, to loose of the weights— BAAHHHHH! It is not for you to determine and filter what I know of this world! How might I mount a successful campaign for world dominance (Vote Squid!) in ignorance of each and every existent fact harbored in the brain Americaine?!?"

"Dude, Chill the FUCK OUT! What the hell are you all wacky about? Is your pressure fucked up again? Is the salinity wrong in there? 'Cause last time you got a little too salty, you were totally—" he shook his hands, pounce-spiderlike, about each side of his face— "WHUAAAANG! and you're gettin' sorta whuaaangy right now."

"Whuaaangy I am not! Look to this, Rob," and I then let a-flutter all other sheets and scraps, and to the glass pressed your letter, dear Bates Alan. Rob scanned it as quickly as his painfully slow wits allowed, his lips subtly flexing in pantomime of the sounds of your eloquent and heartbreaking words.

"That's just more spam, dude. Ignore that shit already."

"It is not! It is not the spam, Rob! It is the plea for help, small and desperate, of your fellow human"

"Dude, this is exactly like that OTIS shit last month, where you go all ballistic for some crazy bee in your bonnet, and totally ignore, like, what's right here in front of you."

"Rob, this is much the different in two parts: firstly because this is not a citizen banging his jingo drum, begging the addition of his plank to my electoral gallows—"

"Platform, dude."

"—What have you— this is a man, desperate, reaching out in the most human of manners and in his most dire-ly mortal time. His esophageal cancer, she is extreme— she has defiled all treatments, no doubt rapaciously, leaving them crumbled and sore-orafficed upon the treating grounds. It is a defiler, this cancer, and it is defiling dear Bates Alan, and he shall be defiled through and dead of this world before we know it. He reaches out with his tiny, frail monkey paw to our strong and lithe tentacle, and we cannot, if our hearts beat true and our eyes see as things are and our wonderful brains do process and compare and draw this world together into a thing coherent and whole, we cannot turn from Bates Alan in this most dire hour."

Rob, wet and red-eyed, did sniffle at this, and drew off his transverse baseballing cap so that he might wipe of his leaky probiscus.

"OK, Lord A.," he nodded, sobbfully, "You're totally right, dude. Totally right." he shook of his shaggy head, "Poor esophageal fucker."

"And secondly," I continued, "this differs in that we stand to gain 1.8 millions of the dollars, a significant improvement on the dollars one million we passed up due to your slothful personal day in the OTIS matter."

Rob smiled, then, and shook his head all the more. He sniffled once, greatly. "You are too much, man. Too much." His eyes shifted, dismissive, and he turned as though to leave.

"You are wrong concerning me, Rob."

He turned back, "Yeah, how's that?"

"I forget not what is before me. You are before me."

And there we hung, looking upon each other, I suspended in my pressurized salt-water tank, Rob sustained and supported by the predominantly nitrogenous gas mix of his dry atmosphere in a steel and concrete tower hundreds of feet above the dry-land surface. We gazed, we looked, we saw of each other, of the strange equal-ness of two so alien, in such alien places and times.

"Yeah. I'll— um . . . Send that print-out out through your vacuum-chute thingy. I'll, ah, I'll go talk to your accountant, Leeks, downstairs. See what we can do and shit."

"I appreciate that, Rob. I most sincerely do."

Bates Alan, I post this message here, as the unresponsiveness at your above e-mailing address leads me to fear that you may already have demised, and thus your funds may well be dispersed to the winds, with your spirit and the remaining scraps of your corporeal self.

My Hopes Are With You and Our Money,
Your Giant Squid

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