“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." - H.P. Lovecraft

Week 2. The fourteenth day of this lockdown, the fourteenth hash mark cut into my arm. I'll be fine. I'm sure. I might just need to sprout more limbs.

I hope you're all reading during this thing!

I'm a committed non-fiction creep by all accounts, but, this weekend I read my first piece of fiction in my recent crummy memory. I re-read Philip K. Dick's "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said" and did it in a record two days. It felt great and was a delight to get back into that particular guided meditation that is a work of fiction on the page.

If you don't know, PKD has an uncanny knack that few authors have for generating very personal synchronicities for all readers of his books. I know, you always think it's just you, like you're the only cracker in the barrel he's speaking to, but you're not. Ask anybody who has ever read a PKD novel, his books freaking print synchronicities in his readers lives. Ask anybody.

I picked "Flow My Tears..." because of it's inspiration for our beer, KING FELIX, that we released last fall. With the Nelson Sauvin in there, It's one of my favorite DIPAs that we have made and I love the artwork that Mark did for the can. It also happens that one of the book's main characters shares a family name with yours truly. As I'm gunning to get real weird on this lockdown, I gotta front-load this noodle of mine with the shiniest confetti around. A PKD novel where you rub up against a character - even if only in name - is a good start to a weird time.

So, I swore to myself, when I started these Rainy Day Projects, that none of them would include TV shows or films. I wanted to give you all something other than passive media to occupy yourself with as we pass through this group initiation. Well, in today's third installment, I am already breaking that rule.

After listening to the (fantastic podcast!!) Weird Studies' episode on Jonathon Glazer's"Under the Skin" I decided to check it out this weekend. This is a brilliant, relentless & deeply disturbing meditation on beauty that will rip your mind apart. I highly recommend it, but, it's not why we're here today.

After "Under the Skin" finished, I was given several options for shows that must have fallen somewhere under the matrix of "sci-fi" & "mind fuck", "time loops" & "isolation". Combing through several options, I landed on "The Endless".

"The Endless" is about two brothers who, a decade ago, escaped what they believed was a UFO cult. Since leaving, their lives have de-performed in just about every way. After receiving a strange letter in the mail, they return to the cult for a night to see if it was as problematic as they had remembered.

I have a general rule that any movie that adapts H.P. Lovecraft, nods to H.P. Lovecraft, or has an H.P. Lovecraft quote for it's epigraph, I'm gonna love. And that was certainly true here. But, what "The Endless" did that other giants like "Evil Dead", "From Beyond", "In the Mouth of Madness", etc couldn't do was to take the Weird and apply it gently to real, human concerns. To be fair, that's not always what I'm looking for when I head down that eldritch path to madness, but, these liminal days have made me soft and find me trying to understand these changes that we are going though - both willed and unwilled - in a context of me straightening my head, my life - my karma, if you have to - as if I'm preparing my house for death.

Why is that, you ask? Because we are. It might not be today, it probably won't be from the COVID-19 virus, but as sure as silly works great with puddy, my aging white ass is going to die. And so is yours. You might even say that this great pageant of beer, lovers, movies, food and show tunes is just a runway for the Big Forever: one good chance to work your shit out before you head to that great laundry heap in the sky.

And "The Endless" provides just that opportunity. And it adds it with the window dressing of time loops, UFO cults, trans-dimensional entities, meth addicts & synchro-mystic clues triggering flocks of birds. It's great! And fortunately, whoever cast this artful slog at familial goading knew that, for this thing to land properly, the brothers had to be extremely likable and have a sense of humor to keep the audience moored against the larger, complicated themes.

You might could argue that the ending to "The Endless" is a bit tidy for what was served for dinner. Or, you could shut up and realize that the value of art is not for you to find problems in an artists rendering of their project, but instead art can be there to inspire, to remind you about life and to pose more delightful and interesting questions that will keep you up at night not being able to answer them. You could also argue that the ending moves this film from the genre of "Weird Sci-Fi" to the woefully underserved "Weird Magical Realism", always a gossomar's thread to my mind and always welcome just the same. I do hope you enjoy it.