A Lad Called Incontinence

Hello. It's me again. I'm in a restaurant. Chiquitos, to be precise. And I'm having a good time. The food is nice, I'm with friends who I haven't seen in a while, and the atmosphere is great. General warm-hearted hubbub is just audible under energetic Spanish music pouring out from loudspeakers throughout the restaurant, accompanied in turn by the gentle sound of giggle gurgle gurgle thud giggle.

I looked up to investigate at this point. As it turned out, it was not an epileptic absorbing fifty hits of LSD and then staring into a strobe light, as I had first anticipated, but rather it was a toddler who was unsteady on his feet, exploring the restaurant with his mummy never more than a foot away, which is astoundingly more pedestrian and boring in comparison with my first assumption. Uninterested, I turned back to the table, wondering how long the main course was going to take to arrive. And that's when I saw it.

Out of the corner of my eyes, I can see the toddler get up from its fall behind a set of steps; arising much like the kraken, except smaller, with less tentacles and without the general stench of rotting plankton. However, looks can be deceiving, and no matter how different its appearance is from that of the kraken, its soul is every bit as black and its intentions are the same. And now it had locked its gaze on me. You could practically see the crosshairs forming on its corneas. A half-gummy, half-toothy smile spread slowly across its head, and the beast began its journey forward.

Eventually, it arrived over at our table, still staring at me, still grinning at me. And that's when the panic set in. I have no idea how to react to children that age. There's no definable purpose behind what it's doing. And there's no way to communicate with it. You can't talk to it, because it doesn't understand anything except for disjointed single words, such as 'food', 'eat', 'cry', 'potty' and 'kill'. And you certainly couldn't drop-kick it off the face of the planet, because its mother was standing there, smiling away, and she'd probably get quite upset and defensive, because Leviathan Jr has her brainwashed into not realising that if I did indeed boot it beyond orbit and into the sun, I'd be doing her a massive favour. So what do I do? Do I smile back? Children are unpredictable at best, and if it doesn't like my smile, it'll start crying, and then it'll look as if I'm the monster. Pseudo-kraken is sneaky like that.

I also started to wonder if it could read my thoughts, and I realised that if it could, it would discover that I knew what its true motive was, and it was at that point that it stopped grinning and finally lowered its guard, allowing me to look it straight in its now-glaring eyes and catch a glimpse of the true cold-hearted darkness that forever resides at its very core, alongside all of the poor unfortunates it has devoured over its lifetime. So I finally decided to follow through with the only sane course of action, and I played dead until it lost interest and giggle-gurgle-thumped its way across to the other side of the restaurant in search of fresher meat. And so endeth this overly-dramatised cautionary tale.

Now, you may be wondering what the point of this all is. Well, basically, in this day and age, people are eating out far less often (a statistic wholly backed up by the fact that this entire encounter occurred in a fairly packed restaurant). Nonetheless, I have deduced that this has nothing to do with inflation or, indeed, the general state of the economy at all. Even if I could purchase a grand sixty-course feast for five pennies and a couple of pebbles, I still wouldn't eat out, largely due to the fact that I'd only feel safe eating out if I was carrying a fishing spear, an RPG launcher and a necklace fashioned out of live remote mines. I can't see it being much fun for other diners either, especially if they're about to tuck into their chimichangas only to discover that an aforementioned notsogiant squid has alarmed me into detonating my own brains up the wall. On the scale of 'Things Which Would Probably Damage Sales Levels In A Food Outlet', it's on par with an ice cream parlour hiring a lad called Incontinence who puts on a coy smile and winks every time he hands someone their chocolate milkshake.

In short, restaurants should ban children. More people would eat out if they knew that there was no chance of A) a small, semi-humanoid creature crying into their pizza and burping milky sick over the waiter, or B) being swallowed by said creature and then digested in its stomach for several millenia, before their main course has even arrived.

Man the harpoons, men, and let's finish this once and for all.