I'm in love with this guy I work with. We take breaks and lunch together every work day; we txt and talk on the phone some. He knows how I feel for him and sometimes I think he could feel the same way. He just recently started seeing someone but still flirts really hard with me—-hands on kinda stuff. So my question is what do I do? Keep being his friend or tell him he needs to stay away from me? I love spending time with him but each day my feelings get stronger... and he doesn't seem to have any plans to be with me. Please help me.

K.

My Dearest Lady-with-Only-a-Consonant-for-a-Name,

Examined fully, I have found that each life has its unfortunate detail: For every mega-millions lottery-winning there are the inevitable taxes and conniving cousins, for each deep-fried turdogducken there is the indefatigable heartburns, and to each president his lone gunman. For you, there is the plight of the hard-hands-on girl-on-the-side. For me, there is my eldritch ethereal demi-essence.

A part of my existence is ethereal — a fact which binds Squid, Human, Marmoset, Dolphin, and Spider together in opposition to most if not all of the remaining creatures of this whirling, watery orb. Whilst we (and the marmosetim, dolphinos and spiders) dwell half within the Eternal and half upon in the Mundane, the rest of the so-called "life" of this planet is essentially little better than the Rock of Pets. As an aside, try to explain this to a vegan, in elucidating his folly; it is an exercise in futility most vexsome.

In contrast to my cohort, the Squid is subject to that most dangerous of pitfalls of ethereal beings — a pitfall which in the general only victimizes those beasts who are fully ethereal, your Archduke's of the Hell, your temporal wanderers, your angels and your Television Stars.

We are, on occasion, conjured by darkest and most corrupt cults into their eldritch circles of power and damnation. And we are asked all manner of things, and most of it is very, very boring.

There was an occasion in the dim past when I was called forth by the power of a decadent cabal secreted away on the rocky coastline of a devastated and forgotten spit of land in the deserted dog latitudes of the Atlantic.

This was, I believe, in 1987, briefly afore the cancellation of Webster, an event that was itself an eerie fore-echo of disasters to come.

I had been casually diving the depths of the Trench Mariannis when, suddenly and without warning, I sensed the echoing incantation of ten of my darker names in quick succession. I had time enough to mutter a brief expletive and then I found myself at the back of a cavern, suspended in a column of water trapped by curling green energy. The cavern was a jagged, cyclopean rift in the living rock of the earth, carved by unknowable forces over an unimaginable period of eons. All about there was firelight, and the incandescent burning glow of safety flares. Between me, in the column of bewitched waters, and the caves slitted mouth, milled a baker's dozen of bipedal creatures in crimson robes, their chests emblazoned with one of my less attractive sigils, a coil of poorly designed lightning bolts.

Directly before my optically perfect eye stood a female, her arms raised, the opening of the front of her robe pulled back by the stretching of her fore limbs. I could see that beneath the robe she wore a yellow shirt of the variety Izod, her collar was upturned. The embroideried alligator grinned fiendishly from upon her left breast.

Her cheeks were fresh and pink, and in one carefully manicured hand she brazenly waved about a serpentine dagger.

"Oh, Shit!" she said suddenly as I appeared, scrambling backward up the damp stone slope of the floor.

Other cultists continued to mill about in the water distance, most clustered around a low plateau of rocks, their cowls dropping together around a shadowed pile.

The female cultist tripped upon the hem of her robe and fell upon her rear, and I wandered about the eldritch significance of this maneuver.

She stared at me through the magicks and the water.

"Teddy!" she finally barked. "Theodore!"

A smallish male who had milled with the other in the back of the cave scampered forward, white-bread comestible still clutched between his pearlescent teeth.

He stared at me and mumbled something, mouth-engorged. His eyes grew wide, and in response I dilated my own.

"Where. Did. You. Get. That. Book.??" The woman asked through clenched teeth. She looked nowhere but upon me. I sighed.

The Teddy grabbed the woman's robe and dragged her from the cave, and as he approached the group who bowed their heads before the white bread and what appeared to be the glistening cutlets of some unknowable beast of the land, he moaned, and each turned his or her head in sequence, and each opened his or her eyes very wide, and at first I wondered if they might not each emit a pure beam of heat from the gaping orifices, but they did not.

They merely scuttled from the cave to leave me suspended in the crooked claw of their spell.

It was so sad, and so lonely in that cave, for low those several months and years. Lonely, until a fifteen year old girl named Darlece stumbled upon me. Then it was boring, a boring which made one crave both loneliness and sadness.

Darlece stumbled into the cave, evidently while on one of many solitary walks along the strand. Her face bespectackled, teeth bebraced, body invariably sheathed in pegged denim slacks and a variety of baggy, sacklike Esprit sweatshirts which, despite her chubsome frame, were nonetheless baggy and sacklike upon her. Over the many weeks she missed nary a single afternoon's visit, and on each regaled me for hours with tales of Mitch Rains, evidently a handsome and kind fellow, although he was obliged "to be a totally jerk at school and stuff, 'cause people wouldn't understand about us." After the third week of her daily sojourns, it became evident that her use of the plural pronoun was principally that which "people" would not understand; it was highly dubious the young monsieur even knew her name.

Nonetheless, Darlece spoke at length and breadth on her carnal interests in Mitch Rains. It was disturbing, not just for the ardent fury of her fantastic passions, but also for the abysmal state of her understanding of both the raw mechanics of human sexual intercourse and gross human anatomy. Exempli gratis: She believed, deeply and truly, that a "blowjob" consisted primarily of blowing upon the male member. She could not be dissuaded from this folly. Despite this profound ignorance, that which she desired was true and clear, and she flushed as she described grapplings and penetrations, thrustings and eliminations, gaggings and fornications that would make the most jaded and criminal pornographer blush and stutter. Throughout her tone was plodding, relentless, and her eyes glazed with the inward-seeing, the full-knowing of what she spoke.

Finally and thankfully, the Darlece simply stopped coming into the cave, and for a while I was left with the occasional flash and shadow, and the more persistent darkness of my own thoughts.

However, it was by the autumn of the following year that I was upon beset by first Darlece again, and then a great many of the youngish teen-set with whom she did romp and gambol. She had told of them my uncanny ability (cast upon me by the fact that "Theodore" and troupe had not completed their conjuration and thus left me incapable of communicating outside of the eldritch field in which I hung suspended) to, as she put it, "just listen" and so I became for a great and horrible time the centerpiece of a decadent cabal of mooning girls.

It was, from thence on, Darlece multiplied by ten million, where they did truth and they did dare, and they did Ouija the board most despicable, and they did cast the question upon the Octo-Sphere Magique. They did braid of the hairs in the damp cave, and on occasion they did sneak in the Schnaps both Peach and Mint, and they did drink of it so as to steal themselves for the practice of face devouring.

And then did the surface-world winter come, and only occasionally was I a-visited by the cohort of girl-children.

But in the early spring, when the lambs did bleat freshly birthed from their mother's gaping vaginas, one of the lesser of the friends Darlece did come to the cave. She, the round of the group, the variegated of flesh, the englassed of the eye, did bring with her a manboy whose face was befuzzed, and before me, as though I were some black-light poster of the Zeppelin de Led, they did perform the reproductive act.

And thankfully, in so doing, they made a set of rocks tumble and disturb the chalk outline of my eldritch entrapment.

And the syrupy and befouled brine did wash over them as the manboy climaxed, and the girl-child whimpered, and out of some combination of hunger and pique I did reach out a quickly fading tentacle and trap them together, forever, in their terrible and lonely embrace.

We were then, entrioed, transported back into the crushing depths and just as they both burst, and screamed, I did devour them in a gulp.

And so, likewise, I admonish you, Dear K. When confronted with such brazen diffidence, you can only do but one thing: Seek your escape at the earliest convenience and wreck bloody vengeance on those who annoy you as your last and parting act!

Yours in briny terror,

The Giant Squid