I can't help but notice that "Stuff X People Like" is the new meme du jour — NPR even did a story on it! So, what the fuck do you people like?

All Best,
Dave . . .

Dearest Editor Dave,

I am much flattered that you are taking the time to take an interest in my personal interests — especially considering your busy schedule and how infrequently you are able to, for example, take an interest in our weekly staff meetings, or the fates of the office bowling team, which now languishes in the lowest brackets (little Trael does endeavor mightily, but the ball is heavy, he is small, and the parquet aisle long and treacherous.)

In any event, please find listed below a brief overview of a selection of that stuff which we giant squids like.

• The crushing hug of the deep: At once both the embrace of a mother and also a natural defense against the whales, the sharks, and the nosy scientists. What is not to like of such crushing water pressure?
• Bioluminescent prey: Squids of all sorts love of clarity. Imagine, Dear Readers, a cheeseyburger that scuttles past with a glowing sigil inscribed upon its beetle brow. The sigil would mean many things to many people, but to you the definition would be delicious.
• The taste of canine flesh: For long years it was my only sustenance, but never did I weary of it. Can you say the same of the pizzed pie or x-tra krispy chickens? There is no fruit so sweet, nor vegetable so nourishing, nor savor so nuanced as the meat of the mutt. Some of your tribe of grunting dirtchimps know this and meet in secret to exchange the poodle, the terrier and the boxer. There is a secret barge that floats on the Detroit River every third day at midnight. Men and women and children who know the canine craving row out under cover of dark in their dugout canoes and pay the top-most of dollars for these sweetmeats.
• Pressurized land-suits: My current personal velocitational device is the work of savant-mechanic Devo and his ex-lover Spider. It is bullet-resistant, can reach speeds of up to seventy miles per an hour, and features grappling arms that can pierce steel. Without it I could not leave the confines of my lab without explosively decompressing and showering my employees with a fine mist of mine own innards and offal. I have been saving the offal-showers for a very special holiday, which should occur within a few days (please keep this secret in the catbag until then). Although we like the offal shower, we like taking the occasional afternoon constitutional even more.
• Bougainvillea: Is there a sweeter smell in the world, I ask? I, personally, do not know, as I cannot smell in the conventional sense. But, if the advertising copy upon the thin plastic sign stuck into the peat of our OSHA-mandated office greenery is at all indicative, then it most surely smells like the first sight of the rising sun's rays piercing the deeps of the ocean. It's a smell that says, "No matter how dark the world may seem, there is always something better on its way."
• Haruki Murakami: Like the greater part of the book-buying public, giant squids enjoy having their current world-view reconfirmed. Murakami's lonely prose is redolent with alienation and isolation. He writes of men surrounded by people—friends and family—and yet still alone in their chilly little souls. Murakami, more than any other vertebrate, perfectly encodes how it feels to crouch upon the floor of the sea, ensconced in a canyon, and to look upon the vast nothing and wonder "Is this all there is?"
• Nickels: In the first, the word clicks pleasingly on the tongue. In the second, the portrait of John Glenn is so noble, has so much panache. Squids, we love the panache
• The Academy Awards (but not the Grammys): The Academy Awards are full of splendor and pomp and, very occasionally, the most worthwhile performer wins (see, e.g, Diabolic Cody). Whereas the Grammys award naught but sales and fawnery. Squids, by-and-large, disapprove of all fawnishment.
• Injured prey, yearning to be free. While we enjoy watching them huddle, shivering, at the bases of cyclopean statues commemorating abstract concepts, we love coursing after them as they pound, panicked, across the pavement. Their grocery-sack boots slap the concrete but offer little firm footing. The bearings of their shopping cart's wheels cry out for mercy and absolution. None shall be had.
• The arcane poetry of Mu, written in a lost Enochian/Sithian pidgin, which, when enunciated in the open air, causes the eyes of the listener to slowly melt from their sockets, and when enunciated beneath the waves, drives whales to beach themselves and die. It is upon this hermetic tradition that American submarines do base their darkest technological bravado. Also, they are delightful songs for twirling late into the night, whilst the tuba oomphas its plangent lull-a-bye.
• Scrabble: This Pennsylvania folk dish—composed of thinly sliced words mixed in a cornmeal mush and then either baked and sliced, or patted into patties and fried—is highly prized among giant squids, owing to the fact that both baking and frying are very difficult at the bottom of the sea.
• Scrapple: This Pennsylvania folk game—in which pigs are thinly sliced, well scrambled within a sack, and then players take turns using seven "tiles" to reconstruct new, interlocked pigs upon a grided board—is the pastime of choice both among truly erudite squids and those dilettantish, yet superior, poseurs.

No doubt, as you review this list, your conclusion is simple astonishment at how very much we do all have in common, once superficial differences in appearance and lifestyle are set aside.

Never did you imagine that mine is such an agreeable lot, no? I am, myself, a bit surprised at what "homey", pedestrian tastes define me.

Delighted, I Remain,
Your Giant Squid
Editor-in-Chief
PMjA