RECOVERING DICKHEAD

Blood, End Times, TV Guide, Hand Basket Shortage

I’m a recovering dickhead. I have the button so it must be true. Somehow this statement from a 65 year old white male seems credible. A large sigh of relief is heard as the “collective you” says, Finally.

You may think that this status update relates to run of the mill jackassery, of which I’ve done my share. Perhaps the confusion is due to the lack of capitalization.

I should have said that I’m a recovering Dickhead. Philip K.Dickhead.

When I was in my late teens/ early twenties, Philip K. Dick was my favourite author. I read almost all of his work, except for a few of the early non-science fiction novels. There is not a lot of science to speak of in a Dick novel; the joy comes from the humour of a wild imagination.

Illustration by GK Bellows showing Philip K. Dick at home. Rolling Stone , November 6, 1975. Source.

I had this full page illustration from an article in Rolling Stone, which had tentacles from a creature coming in the window to strangle Dick at his typewriter. I had pasted the saying “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone is not out to get you,” to it. Who knows? It may still be in the archive, which is down to a few boxes of crap I have collected since the seventies.

Philip K. Dick, one just can’t say Philip Dick, wrote 44 novels and 121 stories to be exact. According to Wikipedia, he wrote “characters struggling against elements such as alternate realities, illusory environments, monopolistic corporations, drug abuse, authoritarian governments, and altered states of consciousness

This is a list of what he wrote in the 8 years between 1961 and 1969.

1961 The Man in the High Castle

1962 We Can Build You, published as A. Lincoln, Simulacrumas a serial in Amazing Stories issues for November 1969 and January 1970.

1962 Martian Time-Slip, first published as All We Marsmen as a serial in Worlds of Tomorrow, issues for August, October and December 1963.

1963 Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb 1965 Nebula Award nominee

1963 The Game-Players of Titan

1963 The Simulacra

1963 A Crack in Space 1966 as Cantata-140 (1966)

1963 Now Wait For Last Year

1964 Clans of the Alphane Moon

1964 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 1965 Bebula Award nominee

1963 The Zap Gun. First published as Project Plowshare as a serial in Worlds of Tomorrowissues for November 1965 and January 1966.

1964 The Penultimate Truth

1964 Deus Irae with Roger Zelazny

1964 The Unteleported Man as Lies, Inc.1984

1965 The Ganymede Takeover, with Ray Nelson

1965 Counter-Clock World

1965 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?1968Nebula Award nominee

1966 Nick and the Glimmung , for children

1966 Ubik

1966 The Galactic Pot-Healer

1969 A Maze of Death

21 books in 8 years. This is a phenomenal output. He wrote so much because he was paid so little. Poverty’s sci-fi rates. He had to write just to survive. Plus, he took a lot of amphetamines. His book A Scanner Darkly gets under your skin with the coming down from amphetamines. Black Beauties, Pink Hearts. No stranger here to Mother’s Little Helpers. My teeth start grinding just thinking about it.

Many of his novels were made into movies, although very few of these movies captured the sad humour that is the essence of his writing. They leave out so many details, as would be expected, but the details made the stories.

Take Bladerunner as a prime example. Ridley Scott borrowed much from Dick’s book Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? But the film left out critical layers of humour and insight. Yes, the movie had androids who were indistinguishable from humans, and bounty hunters whose sole job was to hunt them down and “ retire” them. There was a Harrison Ford channeling Raymond Chandler and Sean Young being all Sean Young.

The University of Michigan summarizes the plot of the novel as such:

Plot Summary:
Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter, plans to kill enough errant androids (replicants) so he can replace his robotic sheep with a real one. In the process of hunting down these slave pseudo-humans, Rick Deckard falls in love with an android and learns about himself and what it means to be human--and inhuman.

The androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are created to be the slaves of humans. They are specifically designed as laborers on Lunar colonies, as many humans have left Earth because it has become polluted and unfit for life. The replicants in this book are created to exactly resemble humans. There is often confusion whether a humanoid is real or android.

Bounty hunters and others use the Voigt-Kampff test to distinguish human from replicant. The test consists of questions which elicit an emotional response. Replicants supposedly have no capacity for empathy, and their unemotional reaction to Voigt-Kampff questions reveals their artificiality.

Question: How many people would fail this test today?

In the book, Rick Deckard is married to Iran. Iran uses a “mood organ” device to “schedule” her episodes of depression. She believes that depression is the appropriate emotion for their situation. This detail of him even having a wife was missing from the Noir style Bladerunner.

Besides mood organs, the book had empathy boxes. People use their empathy boxes in a ritual mind melding, where participants are transported into the body of Wilbur Mercer, a messiah figure who is endlessly walking up a hill, while an unseen crowd throw rocks at him. Participants can feel Mercer’s pain but they also experience one another’s joys and sorrows. The experience is so realistic and intense that it can leave actual physical wounds.

Philip K. Dick often featured sad sacks in unhappy marriages in a crumbling world gone mad. He was known for his “wife” characters, who mirrored his own personal difficulties in marital relationships.

There is humour in the sadness, but also a chill to his satire that never translates into the celluloid versions of his novels. All of his inventiveness is dumbed down leaving us with a more palatable dystopia.

We are watching this new show on HBO called The Last of Us, based on a video game, in which a fungus ( not a virus) overtakes the world, replicating, and forever mutating, infecting and killing their human hosts. The “dead/undead” hosts sometime rise up like fast zombies to feed on the remaining survivors wandering through this mutated wreckage, as they search for a vaccine. The survivors that is, not the fungus zombies. Zombie wants food. Zombie wants fungus.

The Last of Us is just the latest in dystopian dramas. Station 11, Severance, The Walking Dead, Maniac, The Leftovers etc. besides this plethora of end days scenarios, we drown in the blood from cop show, procedurals, spies, and detectives. Gumshoes. Da-dum. Cue the iconic start to Law and Order.

In real life we have a fear of police, but in TV world, the police are sympathetic, alcoholic, heroic, but fucked up and barely surviving their daily skirmishes with Bad Guys. Since our childhood, we squared off into Good Guys and Bad Guys. There was no subtlety or nuance. You were good, or struggling to be good, or you were born bad, a monster, which leads to serial killers, FBI, mindhunters, criminal masterminds, Dr. No.

Recently, we have been watching or should I say drowning in Gangs of London, as my better half notes, blood is the landscape, a character itself, the blood on the wall, pavement, backseat of the car, through the windshield, exploding heads, eye gouging. It leaves no stone unturned or unbloodied. But it is also about family, and the blood that binds.

We love our cop shows, but have grown fond of our monsters. Ryan Murphy, who created Glee and American Horror Story, gives us Evan Peters as Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer. Is it my cynicism, or do I possess remnants of humanity? Something inside won’t allow me to indulge in the normalization of Jeffrey Dahmer.

No, Dystopia is my new drug, preparing me for living in the end times. Dystopia? Dystopia? Ask your Doctor about Dystopia. Perhaps it’s right for you.

Side effects may include uncontrollable itching, nervousness, anxiety, suicidal or homocidal thoughts (and prayers).

We numbly turn the page on state sanctioned violence, the drone murder of wedding parties. We get angry about an insurrection of yahoos, while ignoring grotesque expenditures, literally trillions $$$$ for the Military Industrial Complex. We get caught up in establishment narratives of Good Guys and Bad Guys, to the point where we are expected to entertain notions of “limited” nuclear options. I guess the resulting “limited holocaust, or limited radiation mutating zombies for real” are also for our consideration?

For your dystopian convenience, PLEASE USE A HAND BASKET. Complementary hand sanitizer available.

Seemingly the whole world is getting madder and madder. The man of the street is crazy as fuck, exploding in anger while climate change relegates us all to a real hell in a hand basket. Have you heard there is a hand basket shortage these days?

We are using up all the hand baskets. The one percent are hoarding them, depriving future generations from ever affording high quality hand baskets.

If we really are going to hell, (and the signs for Waldrug on the Dakota highways would indicate that this is the path we are heading down), then we will need more hand baskets. And not the crappy plastic knock-offs they sell at Walmart, but the artisanal hand woven ones created with love. By small children in other countries. Woven from recycled waste. Lined with a thin coating of CIA sponsored heat seeking virus or fungus.

I guess there may be worse things than recovering dickheads.

Dear This Is Not Music

How can we put the fun back in fungus?

Your pal,

Gloomy Gus

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