these election seasons vote Joe Octo the people's octopus

a post to the comments section a few days ago brought back to mind my idea of trying to get an octopus into the municipal election. It never got past the talking stage but there's a bit more to the story.

A few years ago I went to Ottawa to visit friends and family. When I go out to O-town I usually stay with my God-mom and look forward to spending time with her kids who are about my age and we've sort of, but not quite, grown up together so they're like family but not close enough to call siblings yet they are closer to me than most of my friends. Anyway Jess the oldest hitchiked down from Northern Ontario with her boyfriend and got there just in time to see me for a day before I came home. She took me to this Chinese supermarket on Wellington street, it was like a smaller, dirtier version of the TNT near Stadium Station. As we were perusing the isles I came uppon the most astounding thing: a bag of DRIED FUCKIN OCTOPUS!

I was so excited by this discovery that no sooner had I seen them than I decided we needed to buy some. I bought a pre-sealed bag of five and we left the shop. On our way home we picked up some strange flavoured "guava" juice from a neighbouring vietnamese place, this guava juice had cyrilic writing on one half of the can and it was one of those soup can things with the soda can tops, so we were sitting at a bus stop after drinking our soviet guava juice and we hatched a plot involving octopi.

The plan was this, to go around and put dried octopus in the toilets at public restrooms, the goal was that if we both did it on either side of the country and got other people to get in on this with us, that eventually an urban legend would start up about octopus in public toilets. And concievably you could one day be cautioned against using the public facillities at a place because of the octopus.

For me this started a long love affair with the idea of octopus doing things they ought not to be doing... like running for Mayor, or Prime Minister as an independant candidate. We could get a live octopus and at the debates we get it into an aquarium with a tie arround it and then have one of those LCD stock ticker things stream the responses or the speech or whatever... it was going to be marvelous.

I did a google image search one bored night with the word octopus and found a picture of an octopus hiding in a pine tree and I used to use it as an icon on msn and live journal when I had my last computer, never ever do an image search for octopus... there are some things a man was never meant to see and it's all on the internet.

Meanwhile the pre-sealed bag of dried octopus hung from a tack on the wall of my apartment with the word OCTOPOLUTION written on it in black felt marker, it hung there for some months.

Then one day I decided that talk was cheap and I wanted an excuse not to do my homework so I walked down to the starbucks on the corner with my octobag and went into the lavatory. I placed a single dried octopus in the toilet, giggled to myself for a little while and after waiting an appropriate ammount of time I washed my hands and left. I sat outside the starbucks for a while but got nervous about being fingered as the asshole who left the octopus in the toilet so I finished my coffee and went home.

I never did find out what became of that octopus and the prank died soon after I got home when I discovered how dried octopus smells after you've had it hanging in a bag on your wall for months. It took a few days to get that horrible smell out of my place and my backpack and it involved me throwing out the rest of the octopus and vowing never again to buy dried octopi for nefarious reasons.

Joe Octo for city council would have been a good stunt too but every so often I think about the poor barista who had to fish a re-constituted octopus from the washroom at that starbucks and giggle. I'd feel worse except I know that he or she now has an equally interesting story to tell about the time somebody left an octopus in the toilet at work.