mayorofthesea-krakenOf all the questions that I’m asked, the most frequent is, “why don’t you have a Frequently Asked Questions page?” The second most frequent is, “just how tough is it to be a mayor?”

Friends, I can tell you that being a mayor is tough work, whether you’re running a metropolitan area on the shores of Lake Ontario or a vast underwater municipality populated with old fish and garbage and a small  number of majestic and wealthy mammals. Do you have any idea how much work is involved in explaining to fish that orcas and dolphins have their best interests at heart? It’s like they don’t want anything good for their lives.

Tough work gets exponentially tougher when a couple of crooks claim they have a video of you smoking kraken. Can we just take a minute here for a quick breath (I have to surface every few hours anyway for fresh tanks)? There’s just no way that my colleague Rob Ford has smoked kraken.

First of all, kraken are gigantic. They’re so huge that they’re often depicted fighting whales (which my cetacean constituents inform me is rank fish propaganda). Try getting even the tiniest tentacle in a pipe and you’ll see how baseless the accusations against Ford are. What’s that line — if the tentacle doesn’t fit, you must acquit?

Secondly, I don’t know if you’ve tried smoking kelp or dulce or even kombu, but that stuff is soaking wet. You can’t get a good light off seaweed, no matter how hard you try. Same thing with your average kraken: briny and damp. Good luck with your submarine trip, Gawker dot com.

Thirdly, kraken is the worst high. Just the worst. It’s pretty much five minutes of hallucinating that you can taste things with your fingers.

My fellow mayor Rob Ford would never smoke Kraken. He looks more like the kind of guy who’d enjoy the pure ego-inflating burst of euphoria that comes from crack cocaine.

Hold on. I may have misread my notes.

Yours in whale supremacy,

The Palinode
Mayor of the Sea

2013-05-30