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The Poetry Cottage
is so, so wonderful.

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Thank you.

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I actually organized my
reading more than I usually do.

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So I got to just stand in
the little living room area

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and think about all this.

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"The Blob."

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In 1896, nearly 50 years
after Melville's masterpiece,

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three years before Freud's
dream, and my grandpa's journey

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across the Pacific, a storm
shoved seven tons of white blob

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onto a St. Augustine
shore, 23 monstrous feet

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of glistening flesh, a surviving
outcast or alien or devil

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of the deep.

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Chunks were immediately shipped
to the nascent Smithsonian

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for display then storage.

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Until, 100 years later,
a Florida scientist

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examined the same specimen
as well as new blobs

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floated up from the
depths, declaring

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the cryptozoological
curios merely the remains

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of large cetaceans.

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The narrative of the stupefying
has closed with nothing

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more than pure
collagen washed up

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from the oceans,
unconscious, sad to say.

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