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Squid #183
(published June 24, 2004)
Notes from the Giant Squid: Squidsummer Night's Dream

Who is Poor Mojo's Giant Squid?
On the occasion of your Midsummer, I bring you an Almanac(k) item of note. Though by your own feeble reckoning, the true equal-night where the sun is at his apex is on this past 21st of the Juno, it seems according to certain calendarias and other documents that traditional English Midsummer is celebrated on the Juno of the twenty and fourth, which is in fact this day.

And so, in the first, Happy Midsummer to you all. I am certain that such an auspicious event for the land-dwellers as the very apex reaching of your revered solar disk must, in this greatest of the nations of land-dwellers the United of States, in fact be tremendously important. I have also come to know that the observance of such important national Festes is appropriate and required of all candidates Presidential, and so again I say: Joyous Summer Midpoint to you, the sky-fearing grunt chimps Americanum!

A quick glance about the window of my own sky-lair reveals a city at peace and in quiet. Barely a car is upon the street. And so I take this to mean that all dance now gaily in the parks and the fields outside the city, that all Detroitians have traveled hence upon the Eve Midsummer last night to the grassy hills and open plains of the rural state so as to better view the later-than-nine-of-the-post-meridiem-clock's sunset, to dance about the Poles of the May, to marry a thousand young brides to a thousand young grooms, to drink deeply in the drunken blood sacrifice of the monstrous infants terrible and abandoned, and to partake of the magical shenanigans of the wee folk who also so revere this day.

The streets yet remain empty, and my lab assistant, Rob, has still not arrived for work, though it be well into the noon-after period. And so my surmise is correct. Without any the help of my Grunt-servants I have deduced the national character and mood. And so, as you see, I am of the natives born like unto you my fearful fellow citizen. Surely this proves my comity with you and yours, and thus assures beyond a doubt that as I respect, nay adore, your complex and poly-valent culture, I should indeed become your President, first among equals, lord of the upspace, and rapacious oppressor of all grunt-chimp peoples the world over.

To more completely seal this fate of the future coming, to more completely enumerate the ways of my love of the Midsummer, and my respect for its unparrelleled position at the center of your summertide cultural commerce, I shall relate to you a tale of Midsummer, in which I myself figure in small part. Thus doing, will I not only solidify my position as an honorer of the celebrations nostalgic and transcendant of your peoples, but also will I become a small player in the pageantry of your heritages pantheon of beloved characters, like the Satin Claus, the Jesius Ceasar, and the Saint Quick, Chocolate of Easter Bunnycocks.

It was some 21 centuries ago (a time, incidentally, when processions of the equinoxes had actually brought the solar apex to this day, Juno the 24th . . . as is my understanding of the mathematica astronautica and astrometrica of Keppler, that funny little man) that I found myself in the cool and frothy waters of the north Atlantique.

I had been dredging the northern colonies of Atlantis, buried in the benthic slurry, in search of certain alchemically important artifacts that I might use to summon Shub-niggurath so as to ask of her a favor . . . for you see, Shub-niggurath's untold dark young, which spew from her like row from a billion salmon, only differing in that the spawn are less so deliciously salty orange orbs of delicate plumpness, and more so the goat-legged tentacle-trees of a dimension beyond time . . . well, to no account. The matter primary is that these dark young are, as it happens, very good at distracting females, and thus putting them off their torturous and fatal guard. As the young sink to the ocean floor, they writhe in undying pain and thus present themselves as injured male squid, which the rapacious females descend on to taunt, and tear at with their beaks, until finally the males leave in a "pissy huff" as Rob is wont to call it, or are devoured like carrion.

I needed such distractions as the uncountable spawn of Shub-niggurath so as to distract a certain female who had bested me in certain pecuniary matters by way of a game of chance which, upon ultimate consideration, I did believe to have been unfairly arranged to my detriment. She, who shall not be named, was certainly and flaggerently in breach of the honesty for which squids are renowned far and wide, but as it is said, "Where might sleep the thousand eyed gorilla with steely rending tentacles? Anywhere she does choose", and we shall not mention her again.

But, while I dredged the north Atlantique, I came upon Seven Irish Pixies piloting a very small, very sprightly speed boat. As we were in the shallows off the southern tip of Iceland, the cackling pixies and their motor boat were wrecking havoc upon my excavations and so up I came, and in colors most terrifying, and with tentacles entwirled in complex poses of fear, I conveyed to the Pixies my distaste for their rambunctious sea-play.

The Pixies transformed themselves into seven be-winged swine and shat upon me a rain of many foul smelling colors as they swooped through the warm summer air.

Volcanoes gurgled, and the seas frothed with the waves of an unpiloted motor boat (undoubtedly obtained through magickal means from the future) and the chromatically transient feces of Pixies at flight.

Oh, my, Rob has just stumbled in.

After an hour of consultation with Rob, I have determined the following: 1) You do not, as a nation or species,in fact celebrate this Midsummer Festival. 2) Rob he was, in fact, inebriated on distillates of ergot fungus, partaken so as to enhance the aesthetic and psychospiritual appeal of nightpast's firing work display upon the river commemorating freedom, but said distillate was "much heavier shit" then he had anticipated, and he'd had to "ride the snake until, like, eleven. It was fucked up, man. Totally fucked up." He was not, to the best of his recollection, out frolicking in the fields naked and besotted upon some neo-pagan-druidic brew . . . though on this point he could not be certain. He further did not care to hear my "ramblings" about Pixies, not even to the point of explaining what they were if they were not some Band of the Rocks and the Rolling. He finally noted that he would appreciate it if I would not in fact "look to him with the eye . . . the eye that I know of him speaking . . . I know in fact what eye he is referring to and what he means when he says do not look at him in 'that way'."

So, I will not look at him in 'that way.'

Rob then took to indicating of the meters which monitor my tank's environs, and he did tap upon the dials, and did note himself that my salinity is "at, like, 25,000 ppm, dude!"— which, as all must know, be some 10,000 parts per the million less than one would like. I thence noted that, perhaps, Rob should shut of his quack hole and high-thee-hence from my Phantasmagorical Chamber of Colors, lest I draw forward in time the avionic pigs excretorial, their leprepixie masters and a thousand dendritic goatree young to explain, in detail, why I need of none to tell me when I've too little or too great an amount of salt in my tank.

Rob then enjoined me to chill out and permit of him to fix the salinity, at which time I indicated that, given the opportunity, I would tear forth from him his head in this instant if he is to start of the diddling of my dials.

Do you want that, Rob! DO YOU!

I am doing it, Rob! I am calling for the Leprepigpixies to excreplop their sinister colors upon you! Are you wanting that!

I thought not.

Rob has left. Rob has left to take a nap. Do you hear me wee little leprepigsies?

Perhaps when he (that is Rob) awakens (The leprepigsies, as they sleep not, awake not. Worry not for them.) he will care for me to finish this tale. Needless to say it involved Oberon, prince of Faerie, certain young lads and ladies upon a walk in the forest ways, and the sweet nectar of a flower procured from me by the Goodfellow in exchange for the destruction, by him, of seven flying pigs and a certain squid to whom I was indebted. I do not know why he procured the nectar of the flower, nor do I care.

But, I assume, as this celebration is, as Rob indicates, not all that important, that the remainder of the story will remain unheard as it is clearly unwanted.

Good day to you all.

Curse you, your solar disk, and your highly inscrutable ways.

Vote squid.

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