WANTED: Cyclone Larry and the Murder of @beer

Cyclone Larry is a man of mystery. His takes are unsettling, his true identity, or perhaps even, identities, is/are unknown, and now his Twitter whereabouts are in question. The last tweet he sent was the night of October 4th:

As a freelance unpaid investigative journalist, I’ve taken it upon myself to find the missing man in question. Now let me get something straight, I’m not doing this for myself, I don’t have a vendetta against Mr. Cyclone Larry. But I have to do what’s right for all the beers that have been killed due to his heinous acts.

The search starts at Iowa State University. I began asking around if anyone had met, or even heard of Mr. Larry. I asked them if they were there the night of October 4th when Mr. Larry allegedly killed @beer.

It was a trying process; most people gave me shrugs or a “His food takes on Twitter suck,” which I don’t disagree with, but the cookie trail was already growing thin. I was about to head off campus and take my investigating elsewhere, when I found an omen of sorts. An empty beer can bouncing across Welch Ave, like a tumbleweed in a dusty old mining town. This beer can was thoroughly destroyed. I had never seen a can decimated in such a manner since Larry frequented this very row of bars.

The authorities were called immediately to investigate the beer can victim. Their findings confirmed my initial thoughts: Larry was on the loose once more. There was still condensation on the remnants of the can. The killer was close, and the sun was setting.

I knocked on every door: AJ’s, Cy’s, Paddy’s, Outlaws, any establishment with a neon “Open” sign on one of their windows. Night was approaching, as the proper amount of masked and socially distant responsible college kids flooded Welch in an orderly manner. Any one of them could be Larry searching for his next victim.

I walked past an alley, and at the end of it stood a silhouette of a man. A sharp key in one hand, a cold beer in the other.

“LARRY! NO!” I cried out, but it was too late. That beer was about to be as dead as Parks Library during a home game kickoff. He guzzled its contents in a fashion fit for a branch of humanity much nearer the Neanderthals than modern society, and dropped the can to the ground with regard for neither subtlety nor decency. Another hollowed-out aluminum corpse of hops gone by, murdered by a serial madman.

At this point I had seen enough, and called Mr. Twitter himself to tell my tale of the gruesome carnage I had just witnessed. He was disgusted, and rightfully so. Mr. Twitter came down with an iron fist and banned Cyclone Larry’s account for an unspecified amount of time.

Traumatized and tired, I retired to my living quarters for the evening. My gut trembled and my mind raced as the visceral memory of Larry’s assassination of the unassuming beer can plagued my thoughts as I laid in bed.

To whatever few precious, unsullied beer cans still left in the Ames area, I leave you with this:

Run.

Roll.

Escape however you can.

There’s a beer murderer on the loose, and neither cooler nor koozie, nor locked car trunk in the Towers parking lot can save you from the warm, entrancing embrace or the cold, relentless disembowelment of your fluid contents at the hands of the beer-destroying arch-demon we call Cyclone Larry.