Hello, my name is Neal. In some circles I go by thePuck. I am a full-time author and poet, though this is not due so much to commercial success (I have had little) as it is due to a combination of physical and mental illnesses that prevent me from pursuing a "straight" job.
Before my physical illness, which is a degenerative spinal disease requiring regular doses of large amounts of powerful painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, and muscle-relaxers, I worked as a freelance programmer and freelance writer, but nowadays I can't make any guarantees or commitments involving deadlines, so that doesn't happen anymore.
I grew up in Victoria, Texas. I was raised by my grandparents, who were the abusive cliche I'm sure everyone is expecting. My biological mother gave me to them as a sort of distraction, which allowed her to get away from them. My grandfather was a typical southern man, bigoted, emotionally withdrawn, and violent. My grandmother was a former debutante from Switzerland who married "an exciting GI" during WWII, which ended with her stuck in Texas, quite to her chagrin. The great benefit of this to me was that she was educated, and had the majority of the western canon on her bookshelves, which I spent my youth reading. She was also an un-medicated schizophrenic who ruled the roost with an iron fist, which meant that her delusions and hallucinations were fed into and corroborated by my grandfather.
My mental and emotional difficulties presented themselves during childhood, and I spent most of my teen years in a series of hospitals, long-term treatment facilities, and youth homes. Right before I turned sixteen I moved in with the bass player of my band (I played guitar before my spinal problems), and, except for helping out a bit at home when my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer (I know, an odd thing to do, but they were the only family I ever had), I was on my own from then on.
I spent a few years homeless, traveling around the country, and ended up in Santa Cruz, California. For a while I was the manager of one occult bookshop, then the other manager and myself left to open our own shop, which is still open to this day. After a few years of that, I left the shop to go back to college, and gained two degrees in philosophy, with honors. During that time period, I also met my wife, who was just as odd as I am, and suffers from her own anxiety disorders, while I suffer from "clinical depression with psychotic features", anxiety, and agoraphobia. When I was younger, the anxiety/agoraphobia was far more manageable, but over the years it become intolerable (which was part of why I had to leave my shop...I was hiding from the customers in the back and my stomach had collapsed from the strain). I have made two suicide attempts, both in my teens.
The reason I am being so forthright about my past is twofold. First, I always find it helpful to get it out of the way early when interacting with new people. It provides an explanation for any oddness or tendencies, and also allows people to decide they just don't want to deal with me. Second, I feel that here, of all places, I am among at least a few kindred spirits.
Normally, I suppose a person would say that Ligotti's work has profoundly affected them. This, however, is not the case. Instead, Ligotti's work has made me aware that the way I see the world, and the insights into its nature that made me a mental patient in my youth and an iconoclast in both the occult and academic worlds as an adult, are shared by at least one other person. My reading of some of the posts on this board have led me to the conclusion that other people have felt similarly.
As to my literary tendencies...my grandmother did not limit my reading artificially as a child, and I had the freedom to read whatever was available in my house. This led to a firm grounding in the classics, but she was also a fan of horror. I learned how to read before my earliest memory, and I remember distinctly being six years old and reading Stephen King's "The Shining" in my bedroom. The chapter with the ghost of the drowned woman coming out of the tub and attacking Danny had a profound impact...and I knew from that time forward that I wanted to write.
My early efforts were, of course, horrible, but I had a couple of poems published in my school paper during high school. Some of my artistic inclinations went towards music, as well, but my band members were not sympathetic to my worldview or aesthetic tastes...they wanted to be the next Metallica, while I wanted to be the next Sonic Youth or Current 93. It didn't work out.
I have a few credits. Two non-fiction pieces on new media are currently annoying college students. A browser-based MMORPG called "Ghostees!", which will probably never launch, commissioned me to formulate their mythos, write their lore, design their classes, and write their quests. And I have short novella, "Dreams of Fire and Glass" which appeared in two parts in the May and June issues of the Lovecraft Ezine.
My literary and artistic influences are Ligotti (of course), Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Herman Hesse, Edgar Allan Poe, Yeats, the Romantics, the Counter-Enlightenment movement, the Dadaists, and the Anti-Realist movement.
Though I was most trained in the analytic school, I am most influenced philosophically by the Continental school. I will admit freely that my time in academia was an attempt to take refuge in reason, hence my studies in formal logic and mathematics, but over those years it became clear that no such refuge was to be found. The Phenomenalists, the Existentialists, and most recently, the Speculative Realists have made the most sense to me. I am especially interested in Foucault's work on the subject and psychiatric power, while my own ideas on aesthetics have been most informed by Heidegger's writings on poetry.
My writing style is an attempt to capture what I call "radical subjectivism", a reporting of direct perceptions combined with the reflections of a mind in crisis. This results in a continuum of more realistic works on one end and purely surrealistic works on the other.
While I do suffer from depression and my philosophical stances are similar to Ligotti's own (though formalized differently), I also have a love of the silly and absurd, though my humor often has a sickly and angry edge to it. I consider artistic expression and fiction to be our only possible respite from existence, and tear into my escapism, whether it is movies, television, literature, or music, with a never-ending hunger. This means that I am able to enjoy some things that are "good" or "normal", such as superhero fiction, Star Trek, sword and sorcery fiction, and the general enjoyments of geekdom.
This appreciation, together with the love of my wife and my cat (used to be cats, but I've had two cats die in the last year) make my life not completely unbearable. However, when I am in a severe depressive period, I am very anhedonic, which means I can neither enjoy or be interested in pretty much anything, so these two poles, obsessive interest in whatever geekery I have focused on most recently or anhedonia and a lack of interest in much of anything, condition my experience. I don't really have a "normal" mode...I am either obsessing and devouring everything I can find on a given subject (which is Ligotti right now...I'm re-reading everything and finding new things to read) or suicidally depressed and apathetic towards just about anything.
Unfortunately, I am never really "happy" per se. I am either obsessed with something, which brings pleasure through its relief by feeding it, or severely depressed. My wife, who was once in grad school for psychology before her anxiety and agoraphobia became too severe to continue, thinks my brain simply doesn't know how to produce serotonin properly. I have been attempting to seek medical treatment for this, but believe it or not, there isn't a single psychiatrist in the Bay Area that is taking new patients right now. Thankfully, the pain meds and muscle relaxants help with my anxiety, but I would really like some chemical help with the depression.
So...that's me. Nice to meet everyone.
