Guess what today is, dear reader.  Well, yeah, smart ass…it’s August 20th.  But do you know the significance?  Today we are celebrating the birth of a man who somehow managed to make tentacles terrifying long before Japanese pop culture turned them into something else entirely – though let’s be honest, Howard Phillips Lovecraft probably would have found that particular cultural evolution more horrifying than anything he ever conjured up in his fever dreams of non-Euclidean geometry and cities that shouldn’t exist but absolutely do in the space between your third drink and your fourth panic attack.

And yes, before you ask, I am already three whiskeys deep into this tribute, because how else does one properly commemorate the birthday of a guy who spent his entire literary career essentially screaming “THE UNIVERSE IS INDIFFERENT TO YOUR EXISTENCE AND ALSO THERE ARE FISH PEOPLE” at anyone within earshot?

The thing about Howard – and I’m calling him Howard because we’re birthday buddies now, cosmically speaking – is that he possessed this absolutely deranged ability to take the fundamental anxiety of existing in a universe that makes no sense whatsoever (which, let’s face it, it pretty much the human condition distilled to its purest essence) and transform it into prose so dense with subordinate clauses and baroque descriptive passages that reading it becomes its own kind of madness-inducing experience, a literary equivalent of staring directly into the abyss while the abyss files your taxes incorrectly and charges you late fees.

Dig, if you will (and you will, because I’m not giving you a choice here), the sheer audacity of a man who looked at the conventional horror tropes of his era – your garden variety ghosts, vampires, werewolves, things that go bump in the night and occasionally demand your lunch money – and said, “No, thank you, I’ll take cosmic insignificance with a side of tentacles and an extra serving of geometry that makes mathematicians weep.”  This is a writer who made angles scary.  Fucking angles!  Try explaining that so someone at a party.  Try explaining that to someone at a party.  I’ve tried, and it went something like this: “Well, you see, it’s not just any angle, it’s a non-Euclidean angle, which means it exists in ways that shouldn’t be possible, and also it’s probably connected to an ancient god-thing that regards humanity the way you regard the bacteria living in your kitchen sponge.”

But here’s where it gets deliciously absurd (and by delicious, I mean the kind of delicious that makes you questions your life choices while simultaneously reaching for another drink): Lovecraft, this master of cosmic horror, this architect of existential dread, was apparently afraid of air conditioning.  The man who created Cthulhu – a creature so cosmically horrifying that merely glimpsing it drives people insane – was reportedly intimidated by modern technology to the point where he probably would have had a complete nervous breakdown if confronted with a smartphone notification.

The irony is so thick you could cut it with a sword forged in the fires of Azathoth’s blind idiot piping (which, for the non-English majors, is basically Lovecraft’s way of saying “really, really hot”), and yet somehow this contradiction makes perfect sense when you consider that his entire literary project was essentially an elaborate exploration of the terror that comes from realizing you don’t understand the world you’re living in – which, when you think about it, is exactly how most of us feel when trying to figure out why our Wi-Fi stopped working or why our car is making that weird noise that definitely wasn’t there yesterday but night have been there for months and we just now noticed it because we finally turned off the radio.

And let’s talk about that prose style for a moment.  Because reading Lovecraft is like being trapped in a very erudite Nyquil dream where every sentence contains at least 17 dependent clauses, three semicolons, and at least one reference to something that sounds vaguely geological but is actually a sleeping god whose dreams are responsible for that recurring nightmare you have about showing up to work in your underwear, except in this case your underwear is made of cosmic horror and your workplace is a dimension that exists perpendicular to reality.

The man wrote sentences so labyrinthine that getting to the end of one feels like completing a particularly challenging obstacle course designed by someone who studied both architecture and madness with equal dedication, which is to say that by the time you reach the period, you’ve forgotten not only where the sentence began but also your own name, your social security number, and whether or not you remembered to feed your cat this morning (spoiler alert: you didn’t, and now your cat is plotting you demise with the same cold calculation that Nyarlathotep  brings to his role as the Crawling Chaos).

But here’s the thing that gets me, the thing that makes me raise my glass (again) to old Howard on this, his birthday: despite all the cosmic pessimism, despite the fundamental belief that humanity is essentially a cosmic accident that will be forgotten as soon as the starts align correctly and the Old Ones wake up from their Really Long Nap, despite the prose style that requires a graduate degree in recursive sentence structure just to parse – despite all of this, there’s something weirdly optimistic about the whole enterprise.

Because think about it: Lovecraft spent his entire career imagining horrors so vast and incomprehensible that they make our daily anxieties seem laughably insignificant by comparison.  Worried about your mortgage?  Well, at least Yog-Sothoth isn’t trying to manifest through your bathroom mirror.  Stressed about some deadline at work?  Could be worse…you could be a character in “The Colour Out of Space” watching your entire family slowly dissolve into something that probably violates several laws of physics.

It’s horror as therapy, cosmic dread as a form of perspective-checking, existential terror as a weird kind of comfort food for people who find regular comfort food insufficiently terrifying and also lacking in tentacles.

And yes, we have to acknowledge that Howard had some serious issues with, well, pretty much everyone who wasn’t a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant living in New England circa 1920, which is to say that his personal brand of cosmic horror came with a heft side order of terrestrial horror that was, frankly, way more horrifying than anything involving fish people or dream dimensions, because at least the fish people had the decency to be fictional.

But here’s where literature gets weird and complicated and sometimes beautiful in spite of itself: somehow, through the alchemy of time and cultural evolution and the strange way that stories take on lives of their own once they’re released into the world, Lovecraft’s cosmic nightmares have become a kind of shared language for anyone who’s ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer incomprehensible vastness of existence – which is to say, anyone who’s ever been alive and paying attention for more than five consecutive minutes.

His creatures and concepts have escaped their original context and become metaphors for everything from corporate bureaucracy to social media algorithms to the general feeling of being a tiny, confused biological entity trying to make sense of a universe that operates according to rules nobody bother to explain to you and also the rulebook is written in a language that doesn’t exist and even if it did exist, it would probably drive you insane just to read it.

So here’s to you, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, on this sweltering August 20th, your birthday and mine to celebrate: thank you for taking the fundamental weirdness of being alive and cranking it up to eleven, then breaking off the volume knob and feeding it to something with too many teeth and not enough regard for the laws of physics.

Thank you for showing us that sometimes the best way to deal with the incomprehensible vastness of existence is to imagine it’s even more incomprehensible and vastly more vast than we originally thought, and also it has tentacles and probably wants to eat our dreams.

Thank you for proving that you can write sentences so complex that they become their own form of cosmic horror, where the real monster isn’t some ancient god sleeping beneath the ocean but the dangling participle that’s been haunting your prose since paragraph three.

And thank you most of all for reminding us that in a universe full of Things That Should Not Be, sometimes the most radical act is to imagine Things That Really, Definitely Should Not Be, and then spend your entire life writing about them with the kind of obsessive dedication usually reserved for people who collect vintage bottle caps or know way too much about the genealogy of minor European nobility.

Happy birthday, you magnificent, troubled, utterly singular architect of nightmares.  May your non-Euclidean angles remain forever acute, may your Old Ones stay comfortably asleep for at least another few decades, and may your literary legacy continue to inspire writers to create sentences so grammatically complex that they require their own GPS system to navigate.

[Raises glass to the cosmic void, which probably isn’t paying attention but might be, which is somehow both more and less comforting than complete indifference]

Ph’nglui mglw’nath Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn – and also, happy birthday, Howard.  Thanks for making the universe just a little bit weirder, which is exactly what it needed.

N.P.: “Cthulhu” – Gunship