My name or musical trademark is sqidlims, I also am a squid, but with a degree of regret have taken to life in M.I.B.-style secret identity among the certainly inferior (in most ways though not all) but also strangely warming simians mates them in order to endorse my unfathomed Squid-Hop. I feel torn, confused at times, I know I have grown shamefully accustomed to this, uncomfortably dry, yet invigorating, environment. But recently I have taken to swimming out at sea every night reaching further out every night. I feel it.Please help.

Sqidlims

Dear Sqidlims,

Firstly, I must confess both the excitement and the jealousies in hearing that one of my countrymen has actually made the plunge into the hip-hops, thus improving upon my simple hip-hopnotic dreams; you are truly a colossus among squids, and I have the envies. Where might a sample of your squid-hip, and those be assured that you are naught for the sucker MC, but rather have-game and flow in the extreme? Please forward a world-wide-webbed address at your earliest, so that I might imbibe of these goods, consider the fineness of their vintage, and post said linkage upon my perpetual electronic fireside chat as I might see fit.

Secondly, let me assure you, little Sqidlims, I too feel it. Much as yourself, I had too long been out of my proper element, having taken to the Redskinned Ninja Helm of this great Piratical Zombie Ship of State on its wandering Pilgrimage; a rôle which demanded that I take to being cooped within the Ovular Office, and put aside the childish things (including my much belovéd and trusty velocitator), and fully ensconce myself in the pomp and circumstance presidential and Commandarial-of-the-Chief. At first glance, many might think this a return, of sorts, to my element: Washingtonia Deca, and its fetid Potomac, is much closer to the sweet, salty ocean's embrace than be Detroit of the Michigumi, a St. Larry's Seaway away from those tides oceanic. Additionally, a ground floor office—no matter how cramped she is—is far closer to ground water (what a blasphemous oxymoron, no? It is either ground, or it is water; you do not call it "poop milk" but rather "tainted milk." As such, let us call it "tainted water" henceforward) then is the 74th floor of the glass-and-steel carapace of the Renaissance Center Office Housing Edifice. Finally, spending all of my time tank a-swimming is far more squidly then forever sliding into my velocitator and stomping about town.

But, and I believe I quote the American Hero Richard Tricky-Dick Milhauser Noxonia when I reflect that being president is an alien activity for any thinking being: robbed, the President is, of his privacy, of his moments for contemplation, of his respite and rest; at all hours there are emergencies, tell-your-conferences, press-your-conferences, meetings aside the Rosed Garden, considerations to be made, debates to be debated, missiles to be launched, children to be napalmed—and, so much of it is simply politic wrangling, with all for the naughts! Frustrating it is in the extreme! In the old days, high atop my RenCen, if I should choose to kill a wandering homelessman by focusing the sun's rays upon him with my great array of polished metal salad bowls, well then I did so or I did not as the píque did grip me. But in that White House, should I desire to burn a man alive, first there is the convincing of a Senator or Congresspirate to introduce the Bill which might suggest the burning of the economically disenfranchised, then the Hot Committee Actions, the Debates, the gerrymandering and politicking, the back-scratching and quidproquotation—and even then, when all is said and done, more oft than not my Bill died in committee and the vexsome, addled vagabond wandered on, sweaty in the July heat, but far from smoldering, let alone immolation.

And then there was the matter of zombification for Sandraday of the Conners, and the recovery of the ambulatory, senile head of Judge Rhine-Quest, with the unfortunate Stony Lincoln business . . .

It was much to bare, and so I left, and went back to what has, strangely, become the state that I find natural to myself: Wandering lonely as a cloud in my mechanized velocitating environmental suit, alone with my thoughts, out to help my gentle gruntchimp subjects, who are as disgusting as the proverbial pigs in feces, but nonetheless as charming and adorable as pigs, a-wallow in their cool mud and warm grunties.

But this is much in the way of narrative exposition, and little in the manner of advice. Let me share an insightfulness to you, young squidkin:

Humans, like the salamander, are creatures of dual nature. Think on the salamander, born of fire, consigned to the cool mosses of the forest, destined for icy death—not unlike the some Medieval Christian Human soul run backwards, from firey torment of perdition to the blissful frozen Nirvana of pre-birth, pre knowledge.

Gruntchimps, too, are of a double-nature. I think of their sexualities—the procreative urges, that is, not the simple gruntrubtastics of their searching, feckless lives. Think on how a rational beast, such as a fish, might reproduce: the female swims to a secluded birth, a little shoal or backwater, and lays down her unfertile eggs. Then, up wanders a male, who does shoot of his money load, and the eggs laying in the brine are bukkakeéd, and there is a quickening, and later fish occur, and grow, and are delicious.

Now, you might presume that humans, in their reproduction, are much the same: a female takes it into her mind, and so finds some secluded nook—perhaps beneath the porch, or in the dressing room of a clothing boutique—and lays her clutch of eggs. Then, some wandering male finds these, ejaculates upon them (as is his habit—humen ejaculate so indiscriminately in my observation, it is entirely likely that this model could rely upon simple random function), and the quickening, et cetera, et cetera, ad comestium.

But, you will see, this is not the case. Life requires salt-watery births. And so have the humans developed mating-pools? In a manner of speaking, yes, they have: these are inside their bodies. Instead of the newt sliding into the salt water pool to lay her eggs, the human female keeps within her a slightly acidic, salt water pool where she deposits her eggs, and the mail to this local launches a sticky clutch of adventures, motile sperm to find the egg in the pond, exactly as does the fish or newt, but inside out.

All life came from the sea. Humanity came from the sea. But, as they forsook the water for dry land, for mobility and expansion and—gasp in wonder, even the cold lifeless expanse of the Space above and beyond the brave overhanging firmament—they had to carry the water forth with them. They became dual, mud around a fish, the sea inside of the land rather than the speck of land lost in sea. Their brains are bifurcated, as are their souls, as is their flesh (two-legged cleft form! bilateral symmetry! the vaginal cleft itself, entrance to the inland sea of one!) They are ever divided between Right and Left, Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, Want and Deny, HUnger and Satiated—they see nought but a world of twos: Evil Doers and Superheroes, Husbands and Wives, Credits and Debits.

Squidkind, in general, never left the sea; ours is a monaditc mind. We know that Good and Evil are illusory, because of our very form and depending from there, we see the complete, atomic wholeness of the world.

But you, Sqidlim, me—we few, we lucky few, have, by chance or fatal curiosity or perverse opossitional defiance, have gone beyond the rest of our kin: we have come a-dryland. We have become as men: duplicitous beings, full of savage and conflicting desires. We are no longer what we were. We return to the sea, to the hill, to the dale, to the Oval Office, to Detroit, to our Music and our Weather Control Devices and Infernal Engines, and we are lonely and lonely, pulled this way, pushed that by our riotous man-like desires: We are alien to the terrible dry upspace as we are alien to our own, salt homes. We have gone beyond what we can have ever become, or ever be again.

"I feel it," you say.

I feel it too, brother.

What we feel is that which the Greeks—wise and homosexual celebrants of humanness—termed the nostalgia, literally termed "the pain of returning."

THere is no going home; there is only going further: You have your turntables and your microphone in whatever warehouse or sewer you dwell in, I have my velocitator, here, tearing through the midnight forests of West Virginal, looking for citizens whose lives have wandered a-field so that I might return them to their track. We each can only be what we are, what we have become, what we are becoming.

"Please help"? There is no helping such as us; there is no way out, only through. Go further, my boy, my squid, my son, myself: Further.

Third and finally, what sort of squid might you be? For, as assuredly as their is a West Coast, an East Coast, a Third Coast and a Dirty South, so too is there a great diversity of squids. And, while all of the urbanely disaffected negroic are brethren in the abstract, when they are besought on all sides by the squares and authorities, they are nonetheless the most vile and arch enemies when in and among themselves. So too with all of squidkind. As we are both upon land, among gruntchimps and pricky birds and all manner of quadruplepeds, you and I are brothers from the differing mothers. But, when we are among and alone, we might well be of different sets, and much as the Crip is sworn to pop the caps of the Bloods, so too might I feel honor bound, for example, to put a hot one within the corpus of a Sharpear Enope or bush-club Squid, should he fail to act right.

Otherwise, Peace Out.

I Remain,
Your Giant Squid

P.S. Fourth and Post-Finally: Is your M.I.B. lifestyle of the Willie Bill Smith mode, or the Tombo Lee Jones? Either is acceptable; I but succumb to the curiosity idle.