Why are you so big?

Unsigned

Dear Readers,

I have noted that, although I am quite svelte and trim for an Arcitheuthis dux, my girthiness is an object of constant fascination to readers, well-wishers, fans, and those that flee before me in the highways and byways of this great land as I lumber along her macadams and tarmacs in my stomping, rapacious velocitational suit.

There are several reasons for my established and admirable largess of largeness.

1. Diet As all weight-wishers and dilettante-dieters know, a proper diet is quite key for the gaining of weights and masses. For a time, years ago, Devo's husband would speak at length of protein-rich shakes that were guaranteed, in some shadowy, hyperbolic way, to add pounds of muscle every day to one's frame. He was selling these as part of some pyramidal scheme that fell apart not one week later, but I admired his verve and panache, his gumption and his tattoos. For the lab's benefit, I purchased one hundred crates of the liquid exercise.

   It did not work out well. My assistant, Rob, quickly declared that the chocolate-blueberry protein shake tasted not unlike, "licking sandpaper that a monkey wiped its ass with" (later empirically confirmed). And Devo, despite the brave face he put on for his on-again off-against love, took the ninety-nine unopened crates of "maintenance juice" and hid them on a sublevel. I gave the matter no more thought, as it was beneath me in ways figurative, literal, and historical.

   In recent months our accountant Mr. Leeks realized money could be saved by replacing our dogs' foods—used to feed the dogs that feed me, I demand the best foods for them—with the pyramid scheme years-old hormone-enriched muscle-building protein drinks. The dogs took to the drinks like an Irishman takes to moribund verse: They fattened up quickly and became quite succulent. The protein went into the dogs. The dogs went into my demesne. As I was in that demesne, so to did the protein find its way into me. I am now a rippling specimen of my kind; had I an ass, and were it wiped with sandypapers, then that paper, too, would taste of blueberry-choco-monkeys—or, in the least, science would tend to lead us to believe it is so.

2. Economies of scale Any microeconomist—from the stoutest to the barest wisp—will note that expansion always carries with it certain cost advantages. As such, with each of my growing years, I have become a more efficient eater of dogs, manager of men, crafter of advice, forger of boon friendships, and wreaker of havoc. As an added bonus, I displace more water; am more tolerant to instabilities in pressure, salinity, and lines of credit; and can best two D6 of microeconomists per turn in melee combat until such time as their commander rolls a natural 20.

   Am I too big to fail? Hardly so—I may be a "big fish," but the pond (due to both atemporality and the infinite redshift expansiveness of the Universe itself) is large indeed. Nonetheless, I yet grow and, perhaps someday soon, a paltry pan-national economy or two may consider my vitality integral to the daily clank and progress of their macroeconomy. A squid can dream over dinner, can he not?

3. Optics As it turns out, I believe you will come to realize, upon reflection, that I am not so very large, but rather simply to-be-expected-sized and much, much closer than you had initially assayed. It is true. Turn around now in your wheeled computer-desk chair, reach back beyond your cubicle wall, and I think you shall find that I am, like the objects of the mirror, a great deal closer than I appear.

In closing—and this is entirely apropos of nought—I note that, in the general, it is the most perniciously promiscuous of the girls who "has a friend that has this problem," and likewise the most evasive of boys who mumbles when he "is wondering, just entirely hypothetically, how much it might cost to replace the window on a car." As such, I have often been left to wonder about the physiognomies of many of my readers, especially those who so oft query of "how big?" and "how heavy?" and "how massive?"—do they dwell, be-sweatpanted and t-shirted—in their reinforced rolling chairs, breathing through their mouths, and grunting as they teeter forward to reach out for the two-liters of the Mountain's Dew? Must they tip up the Pringles can, as though imbibing a Viking's sweet nectar, for fear their paws might become entrapped by the narrow passage and its sharp metal lip? Do they suppose that, somewhere in the inverse of the equation of my own impressive heft, they might find a proof of their own effortless curve of decent toward a less cumbersome mass, provided they let time, in its infinite and cruel wisdom, run its course?

I, unfortunately, cannot know for certainly. Nonetheless, I do hope I have answered your query, and perhaps even shed some dim—yet enlightening—glow upon your own condition of biggishness, my dear Unsigned.

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