This Octo-Nymph design will be on the cards I send to my closer friends for the holidays:

http://shop.cafepress.com/design/25631429

and, this fantastic website…which I have yet to save the funds to purchase anything from yet, but fully intend to…jewlery cast from real octopus tentacles…beautiful and unusual:

http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5260408

But, like black lace and obscure Tshirts, even the wonderful tentacle seems like one of these things doomed to be abused by people trying to appear weird or mysterious or kooky without thinking it through much.

I remember when skulls were a definite sign of a metalhead, back when metal wasn’t very cool at all and only the poor kids whos’ parents drank too much liked it. Now there’s awful skull-and-crossbones pattern available on every kind of ugly common chav clothing’d person out there. (And every classic goth and even very textbook looking punk gets ‘emo’ yelled at them across the road. Sigh.)
Hopefully tentacles pass under the radar and my dear lovely octopus tattoos are still a signal to the genuine believers in years to come :) *fingers crossed*

I think I might pay someone to screen-print ‘TENTACLES’ onto a T-shirt for me. Or down the body of a tie, maybe *grin*.

But dismally true in my experience.

As the author of the statement in question, I have to add that I no longer see piercings, tattoos, funny hair colors, shiny black sartorial excesses, or t-shirts featuring cryptic German industrial bands as style cues for potentially interesting people.

Don’t get me wrong, I still find those elements intensely appealing, but that scene has been breeding some jaw-dropping idiocy over the last ten years.

But on to the subject of tentacle appeal. I can justifiably argue that I’m one of the only people I know that became permanently fixated with the cephalapoid aesthetic from a very young age.

It started for me when I was given a record album which retold the story of Disney’s film version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea in a child-friendly manner. The illustration on the cover depicted the Nautilus speeding towards some monstrous, black, writhing apparition in the foreground, I had never seen anything like a giant squid before, and had no frame of reference at that age (3 or 4?).

Like dinosaurs, cephalopods had been introduced to me as fearsome monsters in films and comic books, which subsequently compelled me to take a life-long interest and to study the biological facts surrounding these strange creatures.

But why this obsession? For myself, I can say that I find them to be the most extreme representation of what’s truly alien, at least to human sensibilities. They can be a visual metaphor for all that’s unimaginably terrifying and otherworldly, yet conversely, they taste great and look quite nifty dangling at the ends of our utensils (I’m aware that there may be an ethical quandary looming here). Taking it further, some may find, as certain Japanese print artists had, that these creatures could be imbued with an erotic quality as well. I have to also stress that it’s the rows fleshy suction disks, particularly of the octopus, that captured my imagination. The swiveling toothed beads on a squid’s arms are somewhat less appealing, though no less fascinating. One species, the Tanginea Danae sports batteries of cat-like claws instead of discs.

It also may be the fact that octopus have been noted for their problem solving intelligence, and have been observed to exhibit signs of playfulness and even boredom in captivity. I could go on about the dazzling array of color patterns that any cephalopod can create with the chromatophores in its skin, or the amorphous flowing elegance of a locomoting octopus, but I’ll leave the rhapsodizing for another day.

So besides the delightful notion that someone else shares an interest in these squishy things, what does this fact otherwise imply? On one level it can be seen as a sly refutation of anthropocentrism which I suppose, hints at the Lovecraftian notion that “homo sap” is far lower on the universal food chain than current canon would decree.

It would point not only to a perverse sense of humor, but a leaning towards the weirder, more intriguing aspects of science and nature, as opposed to the insipid, starry-eyed optimism that proponents of organized religion and new age thinking extrude from their orifices.