Dear Ann Landers,

The giant squid, with its beak and moist hide, still terrifies me, despite your sage (though perhaps too flippant) advice to “master your inner squid – not your literal squid, F*#%A$$ – the squid-like potential in you that connects your two essences.” But this precisely is the problem. As Walter Benjamin states, “In an aversion to animals the predominant feeling is the fear of being recognized by them through contact.” There’s comfort in difference, and I’m not convinced that I’ll ever be ready for, or even need, squid recognition. But ultimately, you’re totally right, they are “wicked cool.” Do you know that it has arms and tentacles? That its mantle cavity contains both gills and an anus? That its eyes are as penetrating as a goat’s? That these very eyes can see my shame? I bet you do.

Yours,

O.Y. Jelinick

Dear Ann Landers,

I find increasingly that I want more and more, no matter how much I get. Always wanting, always grasping, grabbing with my greasy claws—which claws are both literal and metaphorical. Sometimes, I grab some, and then the next day, wouldn’t you know it, there’s still more wanting. Sometimes my claws are not greasy at all. What gives?

The “What Gives?” Guy in Tewksbury, Saskatchewan

Dear Ann Landers,

Today they found a giant squid in the St Lawrence river. Its mass of stringy white pulp washed up near the loading docks by the port. The stevedores unloading canisters of ‘foodstuffs’ saw the thing and hauled it up onto shore using a crane. Their initial thoughts were varied:
–    One or several stevedores saw this as a good opportunity to take a break from the workday, leaving the squid to the more curious.
–    Another marveled at the power of the sea, at nature’s mysteries, thought he’d seen everything until now.
–    One guy wondered aloud how much extra they’ll be paid to haul that fucker up onto the docks. The union leader made a few calls to headquarters, and lawyers were called, but none was a specialist in aquatic or creatural law.
–    One gentleman stevedore, educated at a grammar school before turning, rather romantically, to a life of unionized labour, recalled the Greek myth of the Lamia, the child-eating she-serpent sometimes depicted with pale tentacles.
–    One made a lewd comment.
–    Another was visibly moved.
–    And so on.
Earlier in the week, I saw it humping and twisting about in the waters near the bridge, and thought to myself, ‘that squid’s going to get itself into a lot of trouble with those union boys down at the docks.’ What should I have done?
Sincerely,
Zigmut Symborska

Dear Ann Landers,

I’m an architect and I live in a glass house that I designed by copying the classic Phillip Johnson design. But there’s a problem, Ann, which is why I’m writing you this letter. (And also to flirt with you, advice minx.) I have perfect 20/20 vision, but I had to go and buy those standard thick-rimmed goggles that architects wear. Implementing the design, I apparently read it wrong (blasted goggles!), because I built a glass horse, complete with flowing mane of glass shards and a large equine penis (wink, wink). What should I do? I got the dimensions all wrong, and I keep getting stuck in the hind leg (nudge, nudge). Too, the glass plumbing is problematic, and it smells like the inside of a horse in here. And now, as I’m wheeling this thing to invade Troy, I fear that the Trojans will see me as soon as I come close to that famous, walled, and perhaps non-existent, city. My life is a total mess. What should I do, baby? (By the way, what are you up to later, darling?)

Yours,

Frank Gehry

Dear Ann Landers,

I feel that not enough sports writers are talking about a genetically reconstituted Mike Tyson biting the ear off of Mohammed Ali in the year 2046, arguably the greatest moment in the history of sport. (Albeit only marginally better than a cryogenically preserved though by then unfrozen John McEnroe transforming into a giant moth and attacking the umpire at the 2117 US Open, which attack was remarkable for that ineffable McEnroe grace, evident despite several stark expressions of insectoidal brutality). I find it incredible that even the most advanced genetic recombination couldn’t prevent Tyson from biting again (although the powerful Don King-led pro-biting lobby surely influenced the scientists’ work.)

Ear-biting is, as you know, a dominant trait from the maternal side, though there is only a 1-in-16 chance that an ear-biter will pass it on to her child, and a 1-in-3200 chance that said child will manifest EB behaviour. There are a few other famous incidents of ear-biting in history. Nero was a profligate ear-biter, and so were the Benjamins Deserali and Franklin, the latter of whom supposedly died in the act of trying to bite off his own. According to Dr. Morris P. Milkcat at Stanford University, it also largely stems from a latent, perverse desire for not wanting to be heard. The ear bite is a “violent attempt to disrupt the communication chain, thereby denying the listener’s subjectivity and justifying the biter’s speech act, any speech act whatsoever.”* Tragically, Tyson had so much to say, but he didn’t want to be heard.

What can we do, Ann, you and I, to help Mr. Tyson?

Sincerely,
H.

* Milkcat, Morris P. “Biting the ear that hears: Otological mastication and/as communication breakdown.” The International Journal of Advanced Otology (13:4 Jan 2002), pp. 46–71.

Dear Ann Landers,

My son just confided in me his aspirations to be not just a poet, but a Romantic poet, and I don’t know what to do. As a gentleman farmer, my views on work are at times in conflict, but I’ve managed to find my vocation. It’s tough, I realize, so I’m open to poetic endeavors. If, for example, he’d confessed that he wanted to become a muscular poet, grappling with his singular place in the universe by sleeping with legions of women, carving out the world one forceful image at a time, I would be proud of my seed. But Ann, a Romantic? I wouldn’t even mind if he became a symbolist, or a dadaist.

But no, he wants to wander about sparsely populated wilderness areas with his soul bared like a pansy, aching over the beauty of the seething, windscraped world. I’ve already noticed moments where his flushed body seems to comingle with nature’s worldscape, and I’m worried. And he has an unnatural affinity for birdsong, and I suspect he hears in it truths far greater than anything I could ever teach him. I’m at my wit’s end. Whom did I marry? And what have we produced?

Sincerely,

Worried in Northhampton

Dear Ann Landers,

Our son has begun to masturbate, which is fine and normal, a perfectly acceptable activity for a young lad of 9. However, coming from a (progressive) Catholic family, we’re afraid that he may be a little self-conscious of the fact that all of his dead relatives, a few cheeky arch-angels, baby Jesus and God Himself are probably watching him as does it. Accordingly, as per your previous advice [Dear Spectophobe, April 20, 1977], we managed to get him one of those relic blankets spun from loose threads from the Shroud of Turin, which blocks the gaze of celestial onlookers and peeping-toms (a renegade Bishop managed to smuggle one out of the Vatican for us). However, how do we clean these blankets without affecting their mystical properties?
Sincerely,
Donna Slupski

Dear Ann Landers,

Oops! I made a mistake, and I need your help. In a fit of pagan lunacy, I (with some difficulty) consumed an entire owl (from plumage to anus), erroneously assuming the incorporation of the bird into my own flesh would furnish me with wisdom, clairvoyance, respect among the locals, and the like. The feathers tasted like dust, and the bones (brittle and hollow though they be) are wreaking digestive havoc, perhaps because of their shardy nature. But then, adding to my misery, I erroneously ate a bunch of hummingbirds, they of the famously efficient metabolism, in an attempt to gain their power, digest those bones, and get on with my day. Alas, I’ve become a twittering, fluttering mess, flitting about helpless and wide-eyed. How many more rounds of this cure-becomes-the-poison game must I play before I learn my lesson, and moreover, how should I prepare the three-toed sloth I have tranquilized in my garage, which sluggish beast I’ll (no doubt, erroneously) consume to counteract my jackhammer heartbeat: braised with the orange custard, or cubed in a herb-infused Sloth Bourguignon?
Beastially yours,
Morgan I.

Dear Ann Landers,

So I work at NASA and there’s also this total skank who works there, and she stole my boyfriend from me, and they went to Florida, and they’re there right now. I called in sick today – should I drive non-stop to Florida, wearing a diaper so I won’t have to stop, and then hurt her?
Sincerely,
Nancy

Dear Ann Landers,

Paul Valéry, as you surely know, once quipped: “If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. ‘Nothing in the paper today,’ we sigh.” But is it wrong to secretly hope for a catastrophe or some sort of disaster? I don’t want anyone to die, experience pain or be entombed in an ossified lava sarcophagus until a young anthropologist of the future named Clinton or Craig unearths the poor guy. Nor do I want to see half of the people I know be murdered and eaten by the other half in a crazed post-apocalyptic orgy of violence after some climatological disaster, but this may just be the thing I need to shake me from my present lassitude. A little hardship and privation, a stripping down of the thick veneer of society so I can have some real meaningful encounters with people and an engagement with the world. Back to basics. But there is a chance that all this will only exacerbate the meanest, weakest and/or most vulgar aspects of my character. What do you think, Ann? Should I secretly hope for catastrophe to test my mettle?
Sincerely,
Torpid in Tuscaloosa