Perilous Press Blog

Lord Foul’s Brain

Six months into the blackest anhedonic depression I’ve ever experienced, and I’m learning to adapt, because I can’t hope it’s just going to go away. The most useful metaphor I’ve found for what I’m going through is leprosy. Your nerves are dead. You can’t feel anything beyond the vague weight and pain of being buried alive in a rotting body. You go through life slowly and carefully and every so often, you conduct a quick survey to see if anything is bleeding, broken or on fire. You try not to advertise your condition, because nobody wants to be around a leper, but you can’t keep up the pretense that you can feel things like normal people do.

Most of all, you have to accept that this is what’s left of your life now, and you’ll never get better.

At least, that’s what it feels like.

If you’re wondering what the hell the title’s about… in Stephen R. Donaldson’s epic bummer Thomas Covenant series, the titular character is a modern-day leper who gets magically healed and transported to a wondrous world of magic that hails him as its savior; but Covenant is so committed to the ugly reality of his disease that he can’t accept the magic. To do so would be to hope, and thus set himself up for disaster when he woke up from what must be a dream. His unwillingness to believe leaves the reader frustrated and disgusted as Tom refuses the play the role of the Chosen One, and then commits a monstrous rape. That’s the worst part about grief, that it deforms us until we can’t hope for, or even perceive, a way out. Until we become the monster we’re running from.

Everyone is coping with depression, apathy and soul-deep fatigue right now, and many have lost much more than I have, but none of that makes a dent in it. When you’re down this low, the gravity of your own sadness is too great to admit any light or allow any empathy. I was already coasting on fumes with the pandemic and miscellaneous tribulations, but in pursuing this dream of making what a substitute teacher makes off his writing, I’ve lost just about everything and everyone I was fighting for. My brain and my heart are broken. I’m doing the work, but no closer to feeling anything but emptiness and regret. Are any extremities crushed, burning or broken? All of them…? Carry on.

The great fantasist and screenwriter Charles Beaumont famously said, “Success in Hollywood is like climbing to the top of a mountain of manureto pluck one perfect rose–only to discover that you’ve lost your sense of smell.” But what do you do when you lose your sense of smell, and you’re still at the bottom of the shit-heap?

It’s tough for anyone to fake it, but we’ve all had to. Smiling at customers when you’d ratherbe curled up in a coffin of your native earth. Going through the motions of a job or a hobby or a life you can’t begin to enjoy. But when your job is writing, it’s on you to deliver the reader from all that toxic mummery and shoehorn them into a world anda skin they’ve never seen before. A place they’d rather be so badly that they’ll willingly peep it through the keyhole of words on paper.

It’s a job like any other and, as the King said, you’ve got to do it even when it feels like you’re shoveling shit from a sitting position; but if the love isn’t there, the reader’s going to wonder what they’re getting paid to read it. If the empathy isn’t there, if you’re not showing them what it’s like to be somebody else and leaving them with a deeper understanding and compassion for their fellow humans, you might as well be writing ad copy (or a self-pitying blog).

A lot of writers and artists have made legendary careers out of turning their grief inside-out or sharing their burnt-out empathy circuits with similarly damaged readers, but manymore simply shut down, gave up or cracked up, and never wrote again. What littlework I can turn out right now isso steeped in psychic poison that I don’t trust myself to put it out there. I can’t trust anything or anyone, least of all myself. Constantly checking to see what’s burning or broken, because I can’t feel it. The news, books, movies, art. Stuff that should reduce me to tears only induces a vague guilty tug of absence, a feeling like I should be feeling something. I recently heard the sound of my own laugh and it scared the shit out of me. This trapped, sickly sound that escaped my chest left me on guard not to let it happen again in front of people, lest they contract my mental leprosy.

I don’t want to be a self-loathing sad bastard or a leprous grief-guru, and art that squirms with pain and grief doesn’t exorcise it for me any more. The pulp existentialism of cosmic horror feels like a luxury item, a Not Of This World sticker on the bumper of an Escalade. I’m trying to dig out of all that darkness, not package and export it. I want to feel something good again. I want to make others feel something good, when I can’t feel anything at all.

Just about the only thing that’s given me any joy, the only thing I can feel at all lately,has been music.

My excellent friend Gretta Anderson and I somehow bamboozled the good folks at Freeform Portland into giving us a biweekly radio show. Freeform is the kind of glorious mutant oddity that could only thrive in a place like Portland. They let you play almost literally anything, the station is reflective of and responsive to its community and champions the most marginalized and overlooked. It’s the kind of thing that makes me wish I still lived there, and I feel guilty as hell broadcasting remotely from exile in Southern California, but it’s the only thing I’ve been doing that feels good.

You play the right song on the radio and you’ve changed the nature of the day for someone, somewhere. You’ve helped them breathe a little easier in traffic, you’ve reminded them of a sweeter time or whisked them away to a waking dream or given them an idea or an emotion that could have come from nowhere else. You check your limbs and find that while one is still broken, another is still burning and yet another has been missing for you don’t even know how long, but one of them is holding a beautiful, fragrant flower. You can’t smell it, but you can share it.

I have to remind myself, even lie to myself, that there is a way out. A way through. No way back to what and who I was, because that’s all gone… but maybe a way to live, and that will have to be enough. If you’ve read any of my fiction, you know that my characters are always fucked, but they never give up. It would be a fitting Rod Serling twist if I ended up trapped in a story, undone by much less fucked up stuff than I’ve callowly thrown at my fictitious victims. But no matter how much I might feel it, might even want it, this can’t be the end.

Not asking for help here or trying to infect you with it; if you’ve been there or know someone who has, and you see me shambling down your street and I’m selling my words, maybe like and share the news even if you don’t buy one. Share them with someone who might feel them like music.

And would it kill you to tune in to Bionic Exotica the second and fourth Monday from 6-8PM on freeformportland.org?

Charles Samuel Hansen (1951-2020)

My uncle Sam died yesterday, just twelve days short of his sixty-ninth birthday. While it’s usually said of people who pass at his age that he had a full life, Sam pretty much missed out on every stage of life that comes after puberty, and seemed to live less than anyone I’ve ever known. But he taught me as much as my mother about the world and how to live in it, and to always give better than you got.

My mother raised me alone while starting a teaching career, so I spent a lot of time with Sam. To even a small child, Sam was clearly not a normal adult, but in almost every way that would matter to a child, he was better. He would take you to Jack In The Box and let you go swimming right after, he watched cool stuff on TV, and never told you to go to bed. Even if you were standing on his shoulders, playing his head like a bongo, he never, ever lost his temper.

Gentle almost to absence, he spoke like a cheap man sending a telegram, as if someone was charging him by the word, until he thought you were safe, and then he never shut up. He had an encyclopedic mind for trivia and a wry, dry sense of humor. He was never heard to laugh out loud, but he loved a good joke, and to make him smile was a memorable achievement. Only then could you get a sense of how much this evasive sphinx craved and treasured human contact, if only on his own terms.

Because Sam seldom left the house, family, television, machines and books were his universe. A hulking, painfully shy man who drove a scary primer-white van in the 70’s, he checked nearly every box on the serial killer personality survey (and bore an uncanny resemblance to infamous oedipal spree killer Ed Kemper), but was a gentle giant who never hurt a fly and toiled tirelessly to care for bees. He kept an observation hive in his kitchen for their honey and disassembled automobile engines on his coffee table. He knew everything about every character actor on every show that would come on the TV, all their past works and scandalous secrets.

He was an effortless mechanic with a passion for motorcycles and a genius for improvised repairs. If it was broken, Sam could fix it. Averse to human contact and utterly terrified of women, he sought safe harbors where he could hide and attain mastery. He watched Jeopardy religiously and knew every answer that didn’t involve popular culture after 1990. We used to joke that he would be theJeopardyGOAT, if only we could get him to compete without realizing he was on the show.

A compulsive collector, Sam would bring over odd toys, comix or curios he encountered while haunting thrift stores and swap meets. I remember him handing me a portable transistor radio he’d found at Goodwill, that transformed in his hands into a submachine gun with the flick of a hidden switch. He gave me a Creature From The Black Lagoonstatuette he picked up somewhere that became my totem, the center of the shrine of my childhood, and later, a tattered paperback copy of Hodgson’s Boats Of The Glen Carrig. Together, we watched Saturday Night Live, Twilight Zone,Disasterpiece Theater, Barney Miller, Rockford Files. Without thinking about it, Uncle Sam curated my whole aesthetic.

Only much later did I learn how the tragically happy accident of Sam came to be. Long before autism or Aspergers were common diagnoses, Sam showed signs of being different––emotionally withdrawn, consumed with objects and utterly at sea with people. He was not quite ten when his parents divorced; my grandmother’s second husband relentlessly terrorized him until he began wetting the bed, whereupon the stepfather forced Sam to wear his wet underpants to school. Around the same time, my great aunt’s husband molested him during a couple sleepovers. He was petrified and told only my mother about it, but they were afraid to tell anyone else. Sam’s emotional clock was smashed by trauma and stuck in the last innocent blush before puberty.

Sam worked in his father’s sandwich shop as a delivery driver until it was bulldozed to make way for condos, and later helped out at the True Value hardware store my grandmother’s third husband owned. Some summer nights, we’d get lawn chairs and Cokes from the soda machine and watch the movies playing at the neighboring Campus Drive-In from the roof of the sawmill.

Later, he struck out on his own, in his uniquely weird fashion, living in a trailer and prospecting for gold in Wildcat Canyon. If he ever found any, he never told us about it. As long as you didn’t make too much noise while he was listening to Paul Harvey, you were free to ride his jury-rigged dirtbikes or ogle antique nudie magazines where the models’ genitalia was airbrushed out, which was far more disturbing than the unconcealed real thing.

He drove trucks for my great uncle’s freight line in Long Beach for a while, and seemed happiest, then. His lonely nature was elevated by this heavily negotiated foray into the world. He had adventures, stories and long, peaceful interludes of safe solitude on the road. When that family business was also dissolved, he parked his truck at my parents’ house, unable to let it go, but equally unable to face asking someone who wasn’t family for a job.

He was like a ghost that haunted our family, always showing up last to clean up leftovers at every holiday gathering. Whenever something broke or somebody needed a ride somewhere, Sam never said no. All of us used Sam while kidding him about his weight, his shyness, his hoarding, and like the Giving Tree, he always gave what he had.

When my first marriage ended in 2006, I moved in with Sam in his house in Del Cerro, the sleek upper-middle class suburb where my grandparents had lived. The sprawling four-bedroom suburban house quickly became the eyesore of the neighborhood as filled in with Sam’s derelict cars and debatable treasures, and in his loneliness, Sam had moved from collecting broken things and trash to collecting broken people. I didn’t complain at the time, because I was one of them.

While Sam had migrated from Paul Harvey to Rush Limbaugh and huffed reactionary political bullshit like unfiltered cigarettes, he surrounded himself with the people his radio mentors warned him against––Ricardo the radical Chilean Socialist, the Pacific Beach Hare Krishnas, the scary beardo dressed all in white who periodically squatted in our backyard. He clung with childish tenacity to racist opinions like a wet electric blanket that alternated cold comfort for shocks of irrational fear, but they somehow never stopped him from offering help or friendship to anyone who could handle his weirdness. In his own weird Sam way, he evolved beyond his prejudices and became a true humanitarian.

It also wasn’t until his last years that he ever had anything like a romantic relationship that we knew of, albeit with a dipsomaniac former softcore porn star and mud wrestler who drank three meals a day and was looking for a place to die and someone to look after her chihuahua. We joked darkly about the odds that when, not if, she died in that house, Sam wouldn’t try to mummify her and add her to his collection. Whatever Donna’s issues, Sam cared deeply for her and took care of that chihuahua for the rest of its life.

I wrote a story about my time staying with Sam, “Inside Uncle Sid” (originally published as “Uncle Sid’s Collection” in Dead But Dreaming 2) that I glibly described as ninety percent true, but if everything I’ve said here seems like the obligatory preamble to a “We Never Knew…” confessional about the day we discovered Sam’s murder cellar, I had to invent the other shoe. Again, without meaning to, Sam taught me how easy it is to misjudge goodness that doesn’t constantly advertise itself.

If anyone could plausibly plead to a harsh childhood as a cause, if not an excuse, for awful deeds committed in adulthood, it would be Sam, and perhaps it’s only a question of when the traumas broke him that made him harmless, where similarly treated men have become monsters. The only time he ever physically attacked anyone was when he got into a shouting and shoving match with his domineering mother over the unsightly junk on his front yard, and took a swing at a cop for trying to haul it away.

Yes, Sam had issues, and he fought stubbornly against any attempt to force normal adult life upon him, down to his denial about his cancer; but I’ve never known a kinder, person who was more stoically cheerful in the face of challenges few could recover from. If he never broke out to live anything like a normal life, he didn’t pass on his anger to anyone else, and in his silent ability to withstand unendurable pain and pressure and always give better than he got, without meaning to, he taught me a little bit about how to live.

Sam died Saturday afternoon at my parents’ house, because the social worker declared his home uninhabitable. He spent his last night on her couch with his back to the TV, mouthing the correct questions to all the answers on Jeopardy. I tried to get down to San Diego from Portland to see him, but he was in too much pain, and resisting taking morphine, and in a moment between breaths, he simply let go.

There won’t be a formal memorial service, and his ashes will be scattered in Wildcat Canyon, as per his request. Almost nobody outside our family will remember Sam, and when we talk about him, we’ll recall the eccentric habits, the silly things he did, the sad, quiet clown that he was; but we should remember and share the great man that he could have been if not for the horrible things that were visited upon him, and the greatness of the good man that he never stopped being.

Available wherever quality paperbacks and edible underwear are sold.

So we haven’t updated our store yet, but RIGHT NOW, you can get Mystery Meat in print HERE, and for Kindle HERE.

(photography by Todd Chicoine)

Witnessed and disavowed at Cthulhu Prayer Breakfasts and damned with faintly droll praise in the New Yorker, banned wherever basic standards of intellectual property are respected… here, at last, for a limited time, is the studio recording of BABY GOT BASS.

Baby Got Bass

Dignity. Always dignity.