Dear Readers:

Over the course of my many centuries in the dreaded up-space, numerous questions have been posed to me regarding my true physical nature. While I must admit that the absolute truth of my being is unknowable and terrifying, a rudimentary discussion of my person in the three spatial and one temporal dimension that you understand is, I think, palatable to you simian minds.

So therefore, I have assembled those most frequently asked questions concerning my nature, and the answers I have endeavored to provide, all here in one handily collected list.

How many arms do you have?

How many tentacles do have?

I have a total of ten appendages: eight arms (think upon those "tentacles" of the lowly octopus— these are much and likened to my brazos muscular, blunt, besuckered from base to tip, varying in length and hearty) and two terrible tentacles, slender, spade shaped at their tip, and over twice the length of any of my arms. The arms are reserved for casual activities (such as manipulating playing cards, dice and pool cues, or loosening small screws from the hulls of Russian subs deep bellow the silvered, frigid surface of the North Atlantic), while the tentacles are reserved almost solely for hunting. While the arms have suctioning grapplers along their entire length, the tentacles are suckerless along their long stalks, and terminate in "clubs" bearing a great many sawtoothed graspers.

My "mating tentacle" is technically an arm, not a tentacle at all— but tentacle seems ultimately more appropriate, as it serves better to communicate the stately grandeur of my imperial phallus (ah, well, truth be told, mine is no "phallus" at all, but rather what your students of their betters term a "hectocotylus." It might interests the casual etymologist to note that "hecto" is Greek for "hundred." I leave it as a task for the reader to draw her own conclusions.)

What does a Giant Squid look like?

What colors are the giant squid?

How does a Giant Squid move?

How fast can they go?

What, indeed, are the colors of the Giant Squid? In the wild, my form was long and sleek, my cephalic sack pointed and finned on either side for quick darting movements. I was like an arrow, Dianic and true, cutting through the waves, scouring the benthic wastes with my dinner plate size eyes. I would jet along, using a puckered orifice beneath my mantle to draw in and expel gulps of waters, moving like and unto a sub-marine jet-rocket. In this form, stealthy and quick, I would take on the flickering silvery color of a school of unsuspecting fish, or the ebon cast of stalking shade.

My arms would spiral together and become the fletchings of my form, and my tentacles would be curled up inside of the mass of arms like deadly eel-like-lashes, awaiting prey.

And when I dwell in the Ocean of the Sea of dream (rarely though that may be), I am that cool knife. I am the slicing cold current of the deep. I am true, and straight and lithe: Apollonian, Dianic, erect and perfect.

But when my brother died, killed and torn by the cursed whales, I cast aside the pure simplicity of that form. I cast aside the silver sheen and the elegant directness of the young hunter.

Up I arose, first in the shell-bubble craft of ancient fiery Vulcan, and on through the many incarnations of craftiness that gods and men have wrought for me. I transformed and was transfigured by technology which has allowed me to pursue all routes to an end for these whales and their tyranny. And on that path, I have accreted, like the nacre that a mussel coats onto a pearl, the many devices and wires and tools which form my modern body.

As I float in this high-pressured tank atop the Building de Renaissance here in the City of Motors, I take stock of my new and ever changing body. The brain is suffused with a thousand glass-enclosed wire nodes which connect it seamlessly to an entire floor of computing machines. I bathe in binary intelligences, entertainment, poetry, spreadsheets, and as much as my original form was linear and discrete, my new form has become axial and unending. Through means both physical and spiritual, I have transubstantiated, becoming my own mind.

My colors are now the many hues of Thought and Fear, my movement only confined by the reach of my spirit, my body a swirl of unconnected signifiers of a former flesh: tentacles and eyes and a beak. I have cast aside the Apollonian clarity of my youth in favor of a Bacchic completeness, corpulent with knowledge and power. I have cast aside the ideal simplicity of Platonic truth in favor of a lateral and ever expanding Aristotelian insanity, which stretches beyond the edges of perception into the confusion tinted lands of infinity.

I move no where, but am all places. I am becoming.

And, as such, am generally, must recently, tending towards wavering a pale shade of dusky rose. But beware the Squid's moody polychromatia— were we to attend the prom, I would most certainly clash with your dress and corsage.

How many giant squid are found washed up on land?

3.5

More to come next week. Thank you and goodnight.

Giant Squid