Here in the northeast, we are on the cusp of the annual squid fishing season. I absolutely cannot wait to break out the old fry-daddy and start dunking calamari rings into beer batter, dunking them in boiling hot vegetable oil and then savoring them in my mouth after dipping them in cocktail sauce and hot sauce.

So my question is, just what is a squid's favorite color? I need to know . . . for reasons.

Sincerely,
Captain Paul

Dear Captain Paul,

My perfect eyes — the most perfect in all of nature or science or that-which-is-neither-nature-or-science — see deeper and farther and more broadly along the electromagnetic spectrum than your woefully inadequate organs. In many ways, to even begin to consider to plan at deigning to attempt to discuss this with you is akin to painting a beautiful and deadly portrait about the pricklyrough taste of the heady, cantilevered buttresses supporting the cornice of a cripplingly heartsad song in order to display said picture before a deaf-mute tromboneer. Nonetheless, I shall try.

I presume that you plan to use this favorite-color-knowledge in order to aid and abet your capture of squids on which to feed (Clever Captain, did you think there is a motive which you might successfully obscure from the view of my optically perfect eyes?) It will likely surprise you to learn that, in my estimation, this is a noble endeavor which I support. We squid are a fecund and lovely lot who breed readily and without thought for the morrow — much akin to those drunken bacchanites, collegiate lads and lasses who continue to honor your "Gone Wild" Greek System. Without a check on our numbers, we squid would fill the sea with our writhing bodies and choke out all life, much as the deer, does, and rays do in the woods and wilds of Michigan. Without hunters tirelessly thinning their wonton herds, the deer will pile high, like so many antleréd garbage-dunes, roiling and spilling across the highways, slaughtering and trampling and suffocating all who stand before them.

That is why deer are known in some circles as arboreal squids.

My favorite color is on the cusp of the spectrum between deepest blue and ultraviolet. It is known as Ultrablue. It is a color one sees at dawn or dusk on the seafloor, or in the color of blood spilled for love, or in certain marbled stone. It was also briefly featured as an eyeshadowing pigment by the Urban Decay Lady's Beautifying Products Corporation. It is a shade which reminds me of the Future Yet to Come, the color of the jingle-jangle-mourning of an electrical guitar playing upbeat major chords.

Other squids, especially the sort you may devour in waters north east of the Northeasternmost States of the New England, might favor either an orange or supra-orange hue — hues which communicate both shame and nostalgia. Bait your hooks with orange-ness and it will remind those squids of the folly of their youth and of times when they felt indestructible, of the trembling afternoon sweetness of a stolen kiss among the shoals, of the sensual thrill of racing near the surface's searing edge, feeling the harshness of the Upspace air on their tentacles and laughing with glee as death fails to take them over and over and over again, forever. It will remind them of such carefree, wild-be-damned days, and they will grow reckless and leap into your maw, oh Captain my Captain Paul. It is a gambit sure-to-fire, and upon that fire you might heat your frying oils and savory sauces.

With that said, I addend a caveat: Do not use actual oranges; the acids citrique irritate a squid's sensitive skins. To die and be supped upon is Good and Right and Noble and but another glittering Facet of the World. To be irritated and perhaps develop a rash is a needless indignity.

I Yet Remain,
The Giant Squid