Well Bottom Blues

THE MACHINERY OF divorce chewed Fat up into a single man, freeing him to go forth and abolish himself. He could hardly wait.
— PKD, VALIS

Rereading VALIS by Phillip K. Dick I find I identify entirely too much with Horselover Fat.

The trippy, cheap Mexican Seventies. The attempts at success (brief but it paid for a house for two practically perfect kids). The divorce that sent my cyclothemic mind rocketing into low earth distress.

I never saw god but drinking scotch and doing Whippets® while listening to the Stones I was convinced the figure approaching through the television static tunnel vision was the devil.

Fun times.

It’s been a while since I’ve read the trilogy so I don’t remember how the first book ends but I’m full-throted rooting for Horselover. If I end up on a desert quest for Ultimate Meaning in a small Japanese car with only two cans of Coke I entirely blame the books of PKD and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow for tearing the veil of American Maya away from my eyes in ways LSD never did.

Postscript—My anamn esus. Horselover Fat died to give us the word of Sophia. And they said: “Kevin is right,” I said. “Go out and get laid.” “By who? They’re all dead.” I said, “There’re more. Still alive. Lay one of them before she dies or you die or somebody dies, some person or animal. You said it yourself: the universe is irrational because the mind behind it is irrational. You are irrational and you know it. I am. We all are and we know it, on some level. I’d write a book about it but no one would believe a group of human beings could be as irrational as we are, as we’ve acted.”

Onward through the fog…