The Sea Slug with the Complement Deficiency

The Sea Slug with the complement deficiency often wore a Livestrong bracelet. He managed to make this look natural even though he was forty and had no arms. He watched American Idol and read Walter Benjamin. He learned German, but then decided to unlearn it to impress his friends. He enjoyed German authors most when he didn't know German. His friends wore many hats, which were always washing off their heads with the tides, because they lived at the bottom (and various other levels) of the ocean. The Sea Slug with the complement deficiency liked to blog in a rather cavalier manner about things like ghosts, sex and obscure dead photographers who suffered horribly from genetic disorders not diagnosed during their lifetimes. Anonymous people would leave nasty or quizzical comments on the Sea Slug's blog to try to raise hackles on his pseudopodia. One day, the Sea Slug discovered a varicose vein on his body while he was taking a picture of himself with a digicam for his blog. This made him feel unsexy and fall out of love with a seagull he had previously admired who would steal French fries from old men on the boardwalk sitting beside the childlike, prematurely aged prostitutes they "supported". One Thursday, the seagull looked for the Sea Slug with the complement deficiency at the place on the beach where they had their usual hook-ups, but the Sea Slug wasn't there. The Sea Slug never appeared again. "Huh," the seagull said after several missed meetings. Then the seagull flew across the ocean to another country where fat people bathe naked on the beach. When they fart, they blow sand in their neighbor's beach lunch. It is not a romantic country. After his affair with the seagull ended, the Sea Slug wrote several libretti for non-existent operas that he published on Lulu, an online vanity press. (When the Sea Slug died, Lulu kept asking for money from the Sea Slug's Yahoo email account, a dunning which persisted for several posthumous decades.) The seagull died in a seagull hospice in France, tended by a rather slutty nurse who hated her job and did Sudoku to tune out the groans of the moribund sea creatures which were her vocation. Guidance counselors had made this job sound so much more glamorous when she was seventeen. By this time, the seagull was senile and the memory of its affair with the Sea Slug morphed into a false memory of "a mere sexual fling" with a rather demanding Urchin. The Sea Slug erroneously imagined that the seagull remembered their love affair with wistfulness and pride. The Sea Slug's mind put great stock in these romantic italics. The seagull's last meal was clams casino and he ate less than a third of it. The Sea Slug's last meal was an algae shake with bits of nori scatttered across the top as a rather gay garnish. As the Sea Slug died, he cursed an obscure dead poet who had written a line that made his varicose vein throb whenever he recalled it. He cursed this poet, who had died at the age of nineteen by taking poison in a snowstorm to avoid freezing to death. The relatives of the dead Sea Slug didn't know what to do with his collection of pornographic seagull dvds and gave them to the Salvation Army. First they wrote "ART CINEMA" on the cardboard box in which they had neatly stacked them. And they dropped them off at the thrift store in the middle of the night. Wearing dark sunglasses.