You don't seem yourself lately. So moody. So angry. Is something the matter? Do you want to talk about it?

Menachim Began
Tel Aviv,
Israel

I...

Do you know, I watch a great deal of your American television, for you see here upon the top of this great steel pillar where the darkness keeps me there is a monstrous dish for the gathering and distribution of microwaves. Typically this dish is used to bounce radio signals, as a kind of booster, and also it sometimes relays the traffic of your portable-handset cellular telephony devices...

I...

Do you see how I can become distracted?

The axon of a giant squid is quite monstrous in size. Whereas your monkey-axon, clutched inside your shallow nut of a brain pan, is only microns in length, the average giant squid has an axon which can reach an inch in length. These are the strands of his brain. Ach... your puny simian brain can hardly....

No. I am not being fair. I apologize, Menachim.

I, my semitic friend, am a GIANT SQUID. Archteuthis archteuthis. The terrible kraken of the deep. And my axons are as thick around as the tip of one of my tentacles, or as thick perhaps as your much-vaunted opposable thumb. You think your thoughts in a feeble way, like unto an electric fog, and consciousness to you is the most ephemeral of smudges... a smear of color and smell and sexual longing barely fit for poetry. You cannot comprehend the sensation of feeling light as it passes through your skin, terrible and burning. Each point of my skin, alive with thought and color and crushing, searching power... I am a multi-billion, effervescent super-colony of truth. Fiber optic cables snake through my ebon pool, and they spiral out into a calyx of wires, long strings of copper and gold, and there are thousands of glass vials driven through my cephalitic sack and through these glass-sutured wounds drive deep the million wires and the water, briny and icy, glitters with phosphorescing dream-scapes as they pulse along the wires from my mind to routers, to lasers, through fiber into a dense, space-age rack of micro-processors that fills four floors. I...

On your American television, wafting along the analog waves of a dead technology, you broadcast the instructions for a beam of electrons to fluoresce on a specially treated screen. My skin is chromatically pixelated and if I hold my four front tentacles together and lift them in front of me I can control the subtle wavering of my skin's color-points and thus replicate the effect of a television (though the color is slightly off) and on that square of moving, rippling light I find a sad replacement for a life.

In this Steel and Crystal tower, a pinnacle of your Ohioan landscape, I am a spirit-god, electrically charged, with my mind stretching out into the world, and I touch the inside of every terminal, every router, every server, every device, like a billion tentacles composed of beauty. And I am so alone.

I am particularly fond of the television show of some moments ago, the "star machine" that was Family Ties. (Incidentally, how do you train all of those monkeys to speak their lines with such passion. Especially the nervous one, the one named for that feral wolf-beast. He touches me. His simpleton brain disease troubles me).

Ah, the ties of the family... the tender disjunct of political conflict as it deliciously discharges over the generational lines. The petty squabbles which rise up between the tall female spawn-ling and her logic-obessesed sibling, an echo perhaps of the great Dionysian and Apollonian conflict that has characterized your monkey-art for so many centuries, they cast huge shadows in my mind, creating the glittering after-images of a lost and missing youth. You touch each other so much. Perhaps you do not even realize it, the way that you dance circles around each other, fingertips tracing the faces around you, running cool through each others' hair, embracing, pulling away, preening and cleaning and grasping and retracting... there is so much simple love all abounding in your species and on your television.

Do you see that? You touch each other so much.

MONKEY-MEN! Curse your bi-pedal forms to a hell of explosions and boiling blood.

Tel Aviv? That old Syrian province town? You foul slug, Menachim. You live close to MY sea and you shall regret it. The word is already out and gone, a thought in the air. Beware the sea, Menachim. Beware. You will regret sullying my superior brain with your simian brain emanations, so much like a disease.

I...

Oh, by the abyss, I ache, Menachim. I ache. You have nothing to fear for now. I am too tired.

Oh, why-o why-o did I ever come to Ohio.

Let us all say a prayer for your celebrity-monkey, Michael J. Fox. The bio-electric disease tears through him and soon he will be erased, and as I swirl my tentacles up into a color-spiral I feel the whole of the internet coursing through me and it is the opposite, I am bigger and more, and terrible and so very alone.

Live a quiet life, Menachim. And every chance you get, take hold of those around you and for your love draw them close with your tentacles and obliterate them with your yearning. It could end at any moment, Menachim. At any moment you could disappear.

GS