The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

the fact that he had very little experience with girls, good looking or ugly, made him get into the shower. So, Daisy took off his clothes right in front of us—he didn’t even care—and jumped into the shower with her. The water hadn’t really rinsed her off yet, and he started making out with her where urine had just been on her lips. And we were freaking out. Of course, he thought we were freaking out because we thought he was this sexual madman and dynamo and we were impressed with his dick size. If he knew that she was covered in urine, he probably wouldn’t have cared anyway.
    We finished off that little cinematic episode by taking the last final piece of meat that hadn’t fit into the program—a big raw salmon, head and eyes and scales and all—and throwing it into the shower and blocking the door. That was the end.
    Q: Do you remember what it was that Sean Beavan said?
    A: Yeah, he said, “This is so wrong.” Make sure you accentuate the so when you write that with a lot of o ’s.
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the reflecting god
[DREAMS]
    A S I WALKED THROUGH THE WILDERNESS OF THE WORLD, I LIGHTED ON A CERTAIN PLACE, WHERE WAS A DEN; AND I LAID ME DOWN IN THAT PLACE TO SLEEP: AND AS I SLEPT I DREAMED A DREAM. I DREAMED, AND BEHOLD I SAW A MAN CLOTHED WITH RAGS, STANDING IN A CERTAIN PLACE, WITH HIS FACE FROM HIS OWN HOUSE, A BOOK IN HIS HAND, AND A GREAT BURDEN UPON HIS BACK. I LOOKED, AND SAW HIM OPEN THE BOOK, AND READ THEREIN; AND AS HE READ, HE WEPT AND TREMBLED: AND NOT BEING ABLE LONGER TO CONTAIN, HE BRAKE OUT WITH A LAMENTABLE CRY; SAYING, “W HAT SHALL I DO?”
    â€“John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
    T HIS ISN’T ME! I ’M SOMEONE ELSE! T HIS ISN’T ME!
    â€“Marilyn Manson to his bodyguard, Aaron Dilks, during an alcohol blackout en route from Leipzig to Berlin
    T HERE’S something I’ve never told anyone. I didn’t even remember it until recently, when I went to the chiropractor and he snapped my neck, causing me to black out for less than a second. In that time, I traveled back in my mind to Canton, Ohio. I was speeding down Thirty-fifth Street in my old neighborhood and there were hundreds of decaying corpses in the road trying to stop me. Their skin was yellow, and the wind was blowing their loose, nacreous teeth back and forth in their mouths. I kept plowing into them, and the instant the car touched them, they disintegrated into dust. Missi was in the car, and I was trying to save her because the corpses were trying to pull her away from me. I stopped the car and stepped out to try and help her, but there were large, mottled, sinewy dogs everywhere, jumping at me in slow motion with bared fangs. At the end of the street, I saw a group moving toward me, like a tribe. Their leader was Traci Lords. Her skin was even more yellowed than those of the corpses and she had a neon pink cross painted across her face. Her motions seemed animatronic. Her eyes were moving mechanically back and forth in their sockets and her mouth kept snapping open and shut like she was a ventriloquist’s dummy.
    In my dreams, I always return to Canton, Ohio. Usually I am in my bedroom in the basement, which, like my grandfather’s basement, terrified me. Except the horror was not in anything tangible, but in my mind. As a child, I used to get scared down there for no specific reason and run upstairs, not just at night but also in the middle of the day. I never felt comfortable alone in my room and always slept with the television on to cover up the sounds I imagined hearing. If there is one ghost in my past, one skeleton still in a closet I’ve never been able to unlock, it involves that old basement. At night my mind struggles desperately to take me back there, to make me feel as if I’ve never left there, as if my whole life has unfolded in that basement. It places people I’ve met since then and will meet in the future in that room, and once there, they twist and contort, become monstrous and malevolent. Then my mind blocks the exit, making the crooked wooden staircase impassable. I try to run up the stairs but never make it to the top because hands are grabbing my legs through the slats between steps.
    In another recurring dream, I can’t leave the basement because some kind of invisible force or person keeps pushing me back against the wall and trying to trap me there. Or because my cat, O.J., an orange tabby I