[As August 2008 marks the close of our seventh year of weekly publication, we shall spend this month enjoying "the blast from the past" with selections from Poor Mojo's Almanac(k): Year One. Please, enjoy! —Your Giant Squid, Editor-in-Chief, PMjA]

[originally published in issue #27]

Greetings and salutations, Giant Squid.

I'll make this question as short as possible: How, my friend, can I help in enslaving the human race and dragging them back into the deep ocean to serve you and your kind until the end of all things?

Sincerely,
Benjamin Jeffrey Bestic
Lowellville, Ohio

Lovely, lovely Benjamin Beastie,

My sides ached with longing when Tom gave aural-grunt to the simple chicken-scratch of your missive. Tom, too, was weeping tears of joy at hearing that your miserable mud-wallowing species has finally come to terms with its exact destiny. Or, possibly, my grabby-handed assistant was weeping because my hunter tentacles (all of them yards long; all of them) were crushing his ribbed-sack.

But even as I expected overwhelming joy—my primary mission is at an end! Finally being called back to the deep to frolic with the Great Ones and the Stalker Below the Sands, to locate a pleasing rift in the Earth's surface and wash ourselves in a lava flow, to sculpt the cooling magma into obscene and suggestive shapes—even in the midst of my great and terrible joy, I felt . . . trepidation? A "disturbance in the Force"? Something, at any rate. Something. Even as a ruby color suffused my upper torso—and we all know what that signifies, don't we my lovely morsels, my McHumans?—A pale greyness crept around my beak. "What could be the reason for this?" I bellowed through my voice synthesizer, surprising Tom, and causing his tiny timpani membranes to ache, bleed and shudder (oh, the parts of him which ache, bleed and shutter!).

Tom had engaged a manual override to the volume control, but I am not a squid without means, and I had countered his control with an amplifier Yon Si smuggled in to prevent his curly-follicled spawn from being devoured by a series of stinging rays at the beach last week. They wrote my message in the tidal sands with their whip-quick tails, while surrounding his progeny in a phalanx of cartilaginous doom. Yon Si quickly agreed, of course, and installed my sound amplifier while Tom was, as he puts it, "in the can." I do not know what this can is that Tom speaks of, but it cannot possibly be as great or as information-rich as mine. My can, my concrete and glass and silicon palace here in the frozen wastes of Cin-Cin-Atti. Tom is always bragging of his can. "I was in the can and I read the funniest thing," he says to me moments before my hunter tentacles pin him to the wall and my tertiary tentacle—yes, that one—toys with the pressure release on his helmet.

Don't brag to me of your can, Tom. Ever. I have the superior can.

Ah, but, to continue with the thrust of my argument (oh, how you humans treasure my thrust, there is no doubt! Ha ha ha!), I don't trust you my little Beastie. A prey who is too eager to be caught is often more trouble than a highly elusive prey.

You are familiar with the angler fish, yes? Only a fish, to be sure—there is little greatness in the boned-fish, but the angler has my fondness, for the angler is clever—clever in a certain base way. Don't misunderstand, the angler is far more clever than, say, you, but . . . still . . . let us say that I appreciate the angler in an . . . aesthetic way. I am pleased by the nature of his evolved and witless guile. But again, to my "main thrust" (HaHa!), the angler dangles before him a tiny glob of glowing meat, the seaming choice morsel to many a low-dweller. But, when the never-do-else fisher comes to collect on his morselette, he discovers it attached to a much bigger morsel—a morsel to which he himself is a morsel. A morsel with wide, razored, and expanding jaws. Snack turns to snacker.

Be certain, this is one of the "oldest tricks in the book." I imagined you mud-monkeys would strike upon it sooner or later—although who knew that "later" would be so very late? Ah well, The Dreamer Who Dreams Without Sleeping always said "show my the guile of man, and I'll show you the moment before Time."

So what pitiful ruse do you have slipped up your flapping textile-tube, Benjamin? Are you poisoned? Envenomed? Has Fritz's biocontrol division finally succeeded in producing the perfect anti-squid?

It won't matter. For when death comes for you—and it will—it will not be from Your Lord Architeuthis; I shall not sully my sucker-pads on your diseased, genetically-modified and envenomed flesh. Although you may hear the sepulchral boom of my voice, laughing as the tiger sharks, hermit crabs, and abalone have their way with you—you will never feel the ardent embrace of my snipping beak.

Although, should you prove to be palatable, I'll certainly delight in sucking the minuscule sweat breads from your cranium.

I will not be fooled again,
GS