Ryan Lawson was born to a family of howler monkeys on a nameless island off the coast of another nameless island deep in the fetid, seething waters of the Caspian Sea in 1976. Festooned by his parents’ eventual emigration to San Diego, he taught himself English with a gaggle of broken sticks, four bricks of limestone and an innate sense of diction, writing himself into Canada in the early 1990s on the back of a swath of controversial articles originally published in the Peruvian Gazette decrying the lackluster enforcement of Major League Baseball’s expanded strike zone.

In his early twenties, his rabid, badger-like charisma landed him the role of Pueblo Estragon in the made-for-TV movie Picante e Godotierrez, a Spanish-language reimagining of Waiting for Godot. His performance gained him both a Galaxatastic Award for Most Unintelligible Accent and a position as national spokesman for a much-maligned brand of winterfresh-flavoured laxatives. From there, he used his newfound fame to maneuver himself into a post with the Bloc Quebecois as Chief Beaucoup de Maintenant, a position in which he thrived until he was harpooned through the crotch by a would-be assassin in what the authorities deemed a 'grave' case of mistaken identity.

Reinventing himself as a bionic-testicled shoe-shiner in the late 1990s, he was inducted into the Bootblack Hall of Fame in 2002 for his tireless work rejuvenating the gnarled footwear of metropolitan Toronto’s clubfooted denizens, and soon thereafter discovered that he was a conversational blight from which polite escape was impossible and retired to the foothills of Ontario to perfect his obnoxious craft.

Lawson currently lives under an overpass and over a secondary underpass between two sulfur mines in the strange geometry of Hamilton, sporadically writing a novel and genetically-engineering a world-devouring monster out of discarded shards of glass, fossilized homeless men and that thing you do, oh that thing, that thing called love.