weirdside
Kaiser
And now for something completely different, if I may borrow that from the classic absurd humor masters. This piece is much more light-hearted than The Suicide Artists. This is my brief account of the Kraken (yes, the mythical beast) living in the modern world. Enjoy.
He puts on a modest gray suit (Italian, and extensively customized), a sixty-foot nautical-themed tie (double-Windsor knot in under four seconds), a dozen pairs of highly-shined black Forzieri Italian Hand-Crafted Leather Cap Toe Dress Shoes, and a gold ribbon pin on his lapel. He has a small breakfast of two dozen yellow-finned tuna and possibly a tiger shark (if he had had a particularly rowdy night with Aspidochelone and Jörmungandr over at Charybdis’ place).
The Kraken lives in a large, hidden cave off of the eastern seaboard. It is a meager one-hundred-thousand square feet (the Kraken was turning his life around, having blown his money on junk bonds and prescription pills, and the real estate agent said this was the only thing in his price range). The cave is extensively decorated. The Kraken was going for a cross between a new age, space age, urban bachelor pad and Carlsbad Caverns. He thinks he did a pretty good job. Purples, blacks, chrome, and glass are used gratuitously to great effect. The exception is the Kraken’s bedroom. Much of this space is taken up by the four hundred (two levels of two hundred) King-sized, Vera Wang by Serta Specialty foam mattresses (he used to have innerspring, but they were just too hard on his back after a particularly large takedown of a Spanish Galleon back in the day). The indent left by the Kraken after he swims off to his bathroom in the morning is sometimes cited as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Its subsequent relaxation back into its normal shape is so spectacular to behold, that a permanent hotel has been built outside of the Kraken’s cave to cater to the event (the Kraken receiving a thirty-percent cut). The rest of the Kraken’s bedroom is devoted to mime memorabilia. A little known fact about the Kraken: his dream in life was to become a master of “the Art of Silence.” The walls are decorated with tentacle-drawn diagrams of “the Rope” and “the Box,” the more complex “Carnival Ride” and (his own invention) “the Superhero, After Vaulting from a Skyscraper, Gets Distracted by a Flight of Pigeons, Misses the Falling Girl, and Smashes Into the Pavement.” A circus-tent sized striped shirt, white paint, and greases sticks like California Redwoods hang on the walls. His most prized possession, a signed-photograph of himself meeting Marcel Marceau, is hidden in a dark alcove two hundred feet above the Sertas. It’s the reason the Kraken gets up in the morning.
After the Kraken goes back to his bathroom to brush his mandibles, he’s off to work. After getting his Graduate Marketing Certificate from the University of Phoenix-Online, he got a job at a successful ad agency in downtown Manhattan. Unfortunately, he had to spend a substantial sum of money constructing what is essentially a massive fishbowl in the vacant lot next to the agency’s main building. He works from eight am to four pm, five days a week. He suggests many marketing ideas for many products. Not a single concept the Kraken has every suggested has been considered for use. It might be that they all have to do, in some way, with fish, sixteenth century schooners, and/or mimes. The more likely explanation is that the “Big Wigs” aren’t fluent in Hydronian, the lingua franca of the sea monster world. He thinks they are naive. (The company is only keeping him employed until their new headquarters is finished in Boise.)
The Kraken swims home after a hard day of being rejected and changes into a palatial silk robe. Sometimes he orders Kung Pow Shrimp from Kenny Wong’s. Sometimes he puts on First Class. Sometimes he goes and visits a few of his friends.
The world’s oceans are enormous, offering plenty of room for dozens of sea monsters. The sea monsters are a tight nit group. They all belong to the same social club, the Order of Splintering Planks. They all belong to the same union, Global 001. Of course, as with every species, their are those who get along together better than others. The Hydra and the Scylla had a falling out a few centuries back after a friendly “Who is the Best Multi-Headed Monster” competition turned south after Hydra purposely hit Scylla in the gut when Scylla was going for what would have been a record number of ships sunk simultaneously (then sixteen, currently twenty-two, held by the Leviathan). There has been numerous attempts to reconcile them, but that many mouths yelling at once is intimidating.
The Kraken swam the few thousand miles to Charybdis, where Aspidochelone and Scylla were arguing about Socrates’ decision not to escape from injustice in Crito. Aspidochelone agrees with Crito, and thinks that Socrates was being selfish in not escaping. That he could’ve done more good, but the allure of martyrism and the chance to be forever remembered overtook him. Scylla disagrees with Aspidochelone, saying that Socrates had to die, otherwise all his teachings were meaningless. She threw out the “eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” spiel. The Kraken finds these philosophical discussions boring. He turned his attention to Charybdis and Jörmungandr. They weren’t very conversational. Charybdis was always drinking (the Kraken feared she may have a problem) and Jörmungandr had to speak without letting go of his tail, lest the world end. It was actually comical watching him try to talk out of the corners of his mouth with that hissy snake voice. Hardly anyone could understand him.
Aspidochelone and Scylla finally finished with their debate and noticed that the Kraken had arrived. They offered him some fresh tourists that Aspidochelone had lured this morning, but the Kraken was on a strict diet, and Americans tended to be fattening. Quite good dipped in Hidden Valley, but no, the Kraken was trying to slim down. Scylla inquired why. A girl, he says shyly. Charybdis raised an eyebrow.
The girl’s name was Maggie. She worked at his office and was really cute. She was quite into fusion, so he had gotten Medeski, Martin, and Wood tickets and was working up the courage to ask her to go with him. He showed Aspidochelone a picture of her from the company picnic and the turtle made a rather lewd comment. Scylla worried about the difference in age, her being twenty-nine and the Kraken being a little over a millennia. Charybdis took a split second to tell him to go for it. He said he’d probably do it the next day and tell them about it this weekend.
The Kraken said his goodbyes and got back to his cave around midnight. He put on his pajamas, a three piece ensemble of anchor print, cotton pants, button-up shirt, and night cap. He went to his bathroom and cleaned his mandibles once again. He kissed Marcel Marceau goodnight, settled down onto his mattresses, and tossed and turned until two in the morning, thinking about Maggie.
The Kraken awoke and went through his routine full tilt and arrived in his fish bowl cubicle an hour early. If he would’ve had the glands for it, he would be sweating bullets (the protection for this was doubly redundant, because no one would have noticed anyway, the Kraken being completely submerged and all). He was distracted all morning, but nobody took notice, a Kraken in distress looking the exact same as a Kraken calm.
At lunch he made his move. Knowing Maggie didn’t understand Hydronian, he handed her a tentacle-written note and the two tickets. His English wasn’t terribly good, but he knew his way around a Merriam-Webster. She looked at him warily through those eyes that reminded him so much of the frothing sea, and said yes.
He went home that evening and got spent the next two hours getting ready. What does one where to a fusion concert? He settled on a horizontally-striped button-up shirt and a pair of loose-fitting slacks. He told Maggie that he’d meet her at the concert at seven. Luckily, it was very near the water’s edge.
The Kraken grabbed a suckerful of sea anemones and jetted toward the boardwalk. He did the breathing exercises that his psychiatrist told him to do when he got nervous. A gang of Perks (half great white, half punker) decided they wanted to fight him on the way. They bit and tore at his carapace, but the Kraken made short work of the measly gang. Unfortunately, Perks usually gave him indigestion.
The Kraken made it to the shore at precisely seven and saw Maggie dressed in a conservative turtleneck and khakis. The relationship was doomed before it even began. No communication. That, and what happened next.
The crowd was focused on Medeski’s screaming organ solo, and didn’t notice the hundred foot sea monster in the harbor behind them. One woman, however, heard a gurgling (the Kraken was trying to seduce Maggie with a traditional Krakonian love ballad) and turned to see what it was. Well, long story short, one scream turned into a thousand, and before you knew it, the crowd was frenzily stampeding, killing Wood in the process. The Kraken got so embarrassed, and, combined with the sloshing Perks, he launched a massive ink bomb into the crowd. It was a blackout. He never saw Maggie again.
That night, the Kraken went to Aspidochelone hangout. The giant turtle knew exactly how to cure the rejection blues, and the monsters proceeded to get monumentally inebriated on Aspidochelone’s stash of toxic waste. He even had a barrel or two of nuclear run-off. The Kraken couldn’t remember much after that, but he woke up in the morning with a supertanker fowling up his den and his tentacles around the Yacumama and Cirein-cròin. After apologizing profusely to the ladies, he made a solemn oath never to let that “soup-in-the-making” talk him into anything again.
The Kraken called in to take a sick day, but no one answered the phone. He gave up after the fifth time and went back to sleep.
The next day was Saturday and he went to the biannual Order of Splintered Planks meeting. He got dressed in the ceremonial poncho woven out of kelp and soaked in the blood of all the fallen monsters (damn Hercules). They were meeting a thousand miles off of Hawaii. Everyone but Aspidochelone (still recovering from Kraken’s “No Worries” night) and the Loch Ness Monster (who was still on probation) was there. “Long Live Ye Who Lives in the Deep Blue Sea,” the ceremonial anthem, was sung by the Sirens. The males had previously all donned their ceremonial, doubloon encrusted ear-muffs/plugs/auditory-sense stoppers. It was beautiful, nonetheless. The main order of business was attempting to reconcile with Japan over the supertanker that the Kraken had destroyed. There were a few angry stares and a few nervous whispers. The Kraken sunk down in the crowd, his mantle going maroon with embarrassment. He offered to pay for it, no one heard him.
The rest of the meeting was business as usual (image cultivation, investment news, etc.) The Kraken went home even more dejected than usual. He took a cubic meter of valium and slept straight through Sunday.
On Monday, he woke up at six, got ready, and went to work. It took him until noon to see the “for lease” sign on the front of the office or the pink slip taped to the bottom of his bowl. He slunked back home. On the way, he pinched his tentacle in a mass of coral. This was the straw that broke the Kraken’s back. He raged and smashed the entire reef to bits (making a young entrepreneur rich in the process, him having collected the more interesting “living sculptures”). The Kraken jetted home at such a speed as to create a vacuum in his wake. He went straight to his room, grabbed his mime garb and his autographed picture and hit the currents. He donned the uniform on the way and signed a contract with a small circus out of Nova Scotia.
The rest of the Kraken’s life is fuzzy. Those who actually saw him perform said that his dexterity and creativity were unsurpassed. Everyone else fled quickly, his wildly quick and intricate art having a similar appearance to a sea monster attack.
He was apparently fired from the circus after an ill-advised tryst with the Bearded Lady and Barnacle Man. The Kraken sunk into a deep depression after that. He became spiteful towards his friends and the justice-less world in general. At one point, he had a cannon to his head, but couldn’t light the wick. The depression and jadedness compounded. He wanted to get back in touch with his roots as a monster of legend. He took down tanker after ore-ship after cruise liner, but it wasn’t enough. He accosted coastal towns and entire islands, but it wasn’t enough. He eventually turned on his fellow monsters. They shook their heads at him and took him into custody. His trial was short. They found him guilty of crimes against monstrosity and sentenced him to be devoured by Charybdis. On the alter he was given a chance to say his last words. He repented nothing. Instead, he swelled his mantle to an incredible size and gave a massive, inky jet toward Jörmungandr. He knocked the snake out cold. The monsters did all they could to keep the Midgard Serpent’s tail in his mouth, but it was all for not. The world ended in a small flash of blue light.
The Kraken, Living. The World, Ending.
The Kraken wakes up at six am everyday. He swims to the bathroom, where three massive vats sit on a secret beach. One is filled with disinfectant, one is filled with rinse water, and one is filled with Crest Mandiblepaste (straight from the manufacturer). He builds up a head of steam, drawing water into its mantle and then squeezing it through a special nozzle on his underside, and vaults into the vat of disinfectant. He twists and agitates, making sure to get every single sucker clean. He then uses his massive tentacles to pull himself into the next vat of rinse water (which is then processed and poured back into the ocean, new, desalinated water replacing it). The vat of Crest Mandiblepaste has a special piece that fits over the Kraken’s mandibles and then two massive brushing heads buff away stains and bits of sailor and marlin, but the Kraken usually has breakfast before doing this.He puts on a modest gray suit (Italian, and extensively customized), a sixty-foot nautical-themed tie (double-Windsor knot in under four seconds), a dozen pairs of highly-shined black Forzieri Italian Hand-Crafted Leather Cap Toe Dress Shoes, and a gold ribbon pin on his lapel. He has a small breakfast of two dozen yellow-finned tuna and possibly a tiger shark (if he had had a particularly rowdy night with Aspidochelone and Jörmungandr over at Charybdis’ place).
The Kraken lives in a large, hidden cave off of the eastern seaboard. It is a meager one-hundred-thousand square feet (the Kraken was turning his life around, having blown his money on junk bonds and prescription pills, and the real estate agent said this was the only thing in his price range). The cave is extensively decorated. The Kraken was going for a cross between a new age, space age, urban bachelor pad and Carlsbad Caverns. He thinks he did a pretty good job. Purples, blacks, chrome, and glass are used gratuitously to great effect. The exception is the Kraken’s bedroom. Much of this space is taken up by the four hundred (two levels of two hundred) King-sized, Vera Wang by Serta Specialty foam mattresses (he used to have innerspring, but they were just too hard on his back after a particularly large takedown of a Spanish Galleon back in the day). The indent left by the Kraken after he swims off to his bathroom in the morning is sometimes cited as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Its subsequent relaxation back into its normal shape is so spectacular to behold, that a permanent hotel has been built outside of the Kraken’s cave to cater to the event (the Kraken receiving a thirty-percent cut). The rest of the Kraken’s bedroom is devoted to mime memorabilia. A little known fact about the Kraken: his dream in life was to become a master of “the Art of Silence.” The walls are decorated with tentacle-drawn diagrams of “the Rope” and “the Box,” the more complex “Carnival Ride” and (his own invention) “the Superhero, After Vaulting from a Skyscraper, Gets Distracted by a Flight of Pigeons, Misses the Falling Girl, and Smashes Into the Pavement.” A circus-tent sized striped shirt, white paint, and greases sticks like California Redwoods hang on the walls. His most prized possession, a signed-photograph of himself meeting Marcel Marceau, is hidden in a dark alcove two hundred feet above the Sertas. It’s the reason the Kraken gets up in the morning.
After the Kraken goes back to his bathroom to brush his mandibles, he’s off to work. After getting his Graduate Marketing Certificate from the University of Phoenix-Online, he got a job at a successful ad agency in downtown Manhattan. Unfortunately, he had to spend a substantial sum of money constructing what is essentially a massive fishbowl in the vacant lot next to the agency’s main building. He works from eight am to four pm, five days a week. He suggests many marketing ideas for many products. Not a single concept the Kraken has every suggested has been considered for use. It might be that they all have to do, in some way, with fish, sixteenth century schooners, and/or mimes. The more likely explanation is that the “Big Wigs” aren’t fluent in Hydronian, the lingua franca of the sea monster world. He thinks they are naive. (The company is only keeping him employed until their new headquarters is finished in Boise.)
The Kraken swims home after a hard day of being rejected and changes into a palatial silk robe. Sometimes he orders Kung Pow Shrimp from Kenny Wong’s. Sometimes he puts on First Class. Sometimes he goes and visits a few of his friends.
The world’s oceans are enormous, offering plenty of room for dozens of sea monsters. The sea monsters are a tight nit group. They all belong to the same social club, the Order of Splintering Planks. They all belong to the same union, Global 001. Of course, as with every species, their are those who get along together better than others. The Hydra and the Scylla had a falling out a few centuries back after a friendly “Who is the Best Multi-Headed Monster” competition turned south after Hydra purposely hit Scylla in the gut when Scylla was going for what would have been a record number of ships sunk simultaneously (then sixteen, currently twenty-two, held by the Leviathan). There has been numerous attempts to reconcile them, but that many mouths yelling at once is intimidating.
The Kraken swam the few thousand miles to Charybdis, where Aspidochelone and Scylla were arguing about Socrates’ decision not to escape from injustice in Crito. Aspidochelone agrees with Crito, and thinks that Socrates was being selfish in not escaping. That he could’ve done more good, but the allure of martyrism and the chance to be forever remembered overtook him. Scylla disagrees with Aspidochelone, saying that Socrates had to die, otherwise all his teachings were meaningless. She threw out the “eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” spiel. The Kraken finds these philosophical discussions boring. He turned his attention to Charybdis and Jörmungandr. They weren’t very conversational. Charybdis was always drinking (the Kraken feared she may have a problem) and Jörmungandr had to speak without letting go of his tail, lest the world end. It was actually comical watching him try to talk out of the corners of his mouth with that hissy snake voice. Hardly anyone could understand him.
Aspidochelone and Scylla finally finished with their debate and noticed that the Kraken had arrived. They offered him some fresh tourists that Aspidochelone had lured this morning, but the Kraken was on a strict diet, and Americans tended to be fattening. Quite good dipped in Hidden Valley, but no, the Kraken was trying to slim down. Scylla inquired why. A girl, he says shyly. Charybdis raised an eyebrow.
The girl’s name was Maggie. She worked at his office and was really cute. She was quite into fusion, so he had gotten Medeski, Martin, and Wood tickets and was working up the courage to ask her to go with him. He showed Aspidochelone a picture of her from the company picnic and the turtle made a rather lewd comment. Scylla worried about the difference in age, her being twenty-nine and the Kraken being a little over a millennia. Charybdis took a split second to tell him to go for it. He said he’d probably do it the next day and tell them about it this weekend.
The Kraken said his goodbyes and got back to his cave around midnight. He put on his pajamas, a three piece ensemble of anchor print, cotton pants, button-up shirt, and night cap. He went to his bathroom and cleaned his mandibles once again. He kissed Marcel Marceau goodnight, settled down onto his mattresses, and tossed and turned until two in the morning, thinking about Maggie.
The Kraken awoke and went through his routine full tilt and arrived in his fish bowl cubicle an hour early. If he would’ve had the glands for it, he would be sweating bullets (the protection for this was doubly redundant, because no one would have noticed anyway, the Kraken being completely submerged and all). He was distracted all morning, but nobody took notice, a Kraken in distress looking the exact same as a Kraken calm.
At lunch he made his move. Knowing Maggie didn’t understand Hydronian, he handed her a tentacle-written note and the two tickets. His English wasn’t terribly good, but he knew his way around a Merriam-Webster. She looked at him warily through those eyes that reminded him so much of the frothing sea, and said yes.
He went home that evening and got spent the next two hours getting ready. What does one where to a fusion concert? He settled on a horizontally-striped button-up shirt and a pair of loose-fitting slacks. He told Maggie that he’d meet her at the concert at seven. Luckily, it was very near the water’s edge.
The Kraken grabbed a suckerful of sea anemones and jetted toward the boardwalk. He did the breathing exercises that his psychiatrist told him to do when he got nervous. A gang of Perks (half great white, half punker) decided they wanted to fight him on the way. They bit and tore at his carapace, but the Kraken made short work of the measly gang. Unfortunately, Perks usually gave him indigestion.
The Kraken made it to the shore at precisely seven and saw Maggie dressed in a conservative turtleneck and khakis. The relationship was doomed before it even began. No communication. That, and what happened next.
The crowd was focused on Medeski’s screaming organ solo, and didn’t notice the hundred foot sea monster in the harbor behind them. One woman, however, heard a gurgling (the Kraken was trying to seduce Maggie with a traditional Krakonian love ballad) and turned to see what it was. Well, long story short, one scream turned into a thousand, and before you knew it, the crowd was frenzily stampeding, killing Wood in the process. The Kraken got so embarrassed, and, combined with the sloshing Perks, he launched a massive ink bomb into the crowd. It was a blackout. He never saw Maggie again.
That night, the Kraken went to Aspidochelone hangout. The giant turtle knew exactly how to cure the rejection blues, and the monsters proceeded to get monumentally inebriated on Aspidochelone’s stash of toxic waste. He even had a barrel or two of nuclear run-off. The Kraken couldn’t remember much after that, but he woke up in the morning with a supertanker fowling up his den and his tentacles around the Yacumama and Cirein-cròin. After apologizing profusely to the ladies, he made a solemn oath never to let that “soup-in-the-making” talk him into anything again.
The Kraken called in to take a sick day, but no one answered the phone. He gave up after the fifth time and went back to sleep.
The next day was Saturday and he went to the biannual Order of Splintered Planks meeting. He got dressed in the ceremonial poncho woven out of kelp and soaked in the blood of all the fallen monsters (damn Hercules). They were meeting a thousand miles off of Hawaii. Everyone but Aspidochelone (still recovering from Kraken’s “No Worries” night) and the Loch Ness Monster (who was still on probation) was there. “Long Live Ye Who Lives in the Deep Blue Sea,” the ceremonial anthem, was sung by the Sirens. The males had previously all donned their ceremonial, doubloon encrusted ear-muffs/plugs/auditory-sense stoppers. It was beautiful, nonetheless. The main order of business was attempting to reconcile with Japan over the supertanker that the Kraken had destroyed. There were a few angry stares and a few nervous whispers. The Kraken sunk down in the crowd, his mantle going maroon with embarrassment. He offered to pay for it, no one heard him.
The rest of the meeting was business as usual (image cultivation, investment news, etc.) The Kraken went home even more dejected than usual. He took a cubic meter of valium and slept straight through Sunday.
On Monday, he woke up at six, got ready, and went to work. It took him until noon to see the “for lease” sign on the front of the office or the pink slip taped to the bottom of his bowl. He slunked back home. On the way, he pinched his tentacle in a mass of coral. This was the straw that broke the Kraken’s back. He raged and smashed the entire reef to bits (making a young entrepreneur rich in the process, him having collected the more interesting “living sculptures”). The Kraken jetted home at such a speed as to create a vacuum in his wake. He went straight to his room, grabbed his mime garb and his autographed picture and hit the currents. He donned the uniform on the way and signed a contract with a small circus out of Nova Scotia.
The rest of the Kraken’s life is fuzzy. Those who actually saw him perform said that his dexterity and creativity were unsurpassed. Everyone else fled quickly, his wildly quick and intricate art having a similar appearance to a sea monster attack.
He was apparently fired from the circus after an ill-advised tryst with the Bearded Lady and Barnacle Man. The Kraken sunk into a deep depression after that. He became spiteful towards his friends and the justice-less world in general. At one point, he had a cannon to his head, but couldn’t light the wick. The depression and jadedness compounded. He wanted to get back in touch with his roots as a monster of legend. He took down tanker after ore-ship after cruise liner, but it wasn’t enough. He accosted coastal towns and entire islands, but it wasn’t enough. He eventually turned on his fellow monsters. They shook their heads at him and took him into custody. His trial was short. They found him guilty of crimes against monstrosity and sentenced him to be devoured by Charybdis. On the alter he was given a chance to say his last words. He repented nothing. Instead, he swelled his mantle to an incredible size and gave a massive, inky jet toward Jörmungandr. He knocked the snake out cold. The monsters did all they could to keep the Midgard Serpent’s tail in his mouth, but it was all for not. The world ended in a small flash of blue light.
