I first encountered it years ago when, rattling around the greasy alleyway flanking the belles lettres, I crashed in a bit beer woozy through a disused side door in zips, boots, jacket, chains, and an erratic psychobilly pompadour held together with NuNile pomade and Aqua Net spray (it’s true!). Though I hadn’t yet the words to say it quite so, I was my own walkin’, talkin’ expressionist monstrosity, distorting and exaggerating myself in the service of what I believed to be a more authentic marker of the human condition. Or something–whatever it was we punk rock types were after, lobbing our vane grenades of disgust into the pillboxes of so much disappointment. So predisposed, I’d already waded into fragrant puddles iridescent with the drippings of Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Robbe-Grillet, William Burroughs, and the rest, all of whom inspired my first frightful attempts ….

(Excerpted from