I dropped in on Langel’s BBQ bash a number of hours back. The experience is one I could only justify myself describing as profoundly odd and uncomfortable in the most interesting fashion.

To say that I didn’t fit in would be an understatement of monumental proportion. The gentleman to my two-o-clock described an encounter with an acid dealer named ‘twig’ and the fellow to his immediate left told his surrounders that he’d known the dead kid they found somewhere I doubt I’d even have heard of. There was much patching and safety-pinning of clothes and it seemed that, and I just plain didn’t know that tobacco can come in coffee cans and must only be taken when hand rolled and passed between good friends.

Fuck if I know, man, the worst drug I’ve ever done was NyQuil – and that shit puts me in my place. Don’t worry, though, I am a casual user – I only take it when I’ve got, like, a flu or something. They say it is a gateway drug. They say its street name is ‘the kwil’ and that if it weren’t for ‘the man’ and his desire to keep us down it would be illegal. I have my doubts.

I bet chewing heroine tastes better than the adult dose of the kwil, though. Can one chew heroine? See? I am not into this stuff.

I was furiously not of the same social space as those around us. This is not a class thing I am describing – nothing of any scale or comparison – but a pure juxtaposition. To see Langel and I together would be, I’d assume, almost comical. You’d imagine a dichotomy, I think, that would seem almost as that of oil and water. I wear a tie to work. As far as I can tell, Langel wears a ripped tee and jeans. I find smudges on my glass coffee table a tad bothersome. The house I walked through this afternoon was a work of art in the medium of free-form object placement with leftovers as accent pieces. I am 511, he’s 6+ – I’m clean shaven, he wears a half beard – I have little personal freak-outs if I miss my deodorant one morning and I’d be willing to bet he showers in his mismatched ‘Roos. Please don’t read my description as anything but a side-by-side, as I hold a respect for this guy that I’ve found almost hard to deal with; I am just pointing out that we look as likely to hang out together as an ostrich and a fucking tiger shark.

There are connections, though. As a matter of fact, we meet mostly to discuss this project we are working on which is entirely a shared interest. When we hang we discuss things – things that make me feel all wound up inside – things like Voltron and Robert Stack; Kung Fu and Optimus Prime. His grasp of technologies that I am interested in is astounding and his musical talent is terribly respectable.

How could we be so different superficially then? I think the question is more easily asked as follows: How can we be so much the same on so many levels when we so obviously move around in wholly different realities?

It’s the marketing. You can blame Takara and Nintendo, He-Man and Thundercats. When I stood in his living room I was in a tiny little portion of my deepest memories of times past. I stared at a wall of NES carts and artifacts, action figures and the like, that I recognized with an almost visceral immediacy. We were both born in an era that stressed an obsession with icons that fed an economic beast that I believe has yet to be rivaled. When you say Zelda, people my age say ‘Fuck Yes!’

We may express it differently, but we are one somewhere deep down, as I believe everyone our age is. It is good to know that no matter what I have a link with others of my ilk. When in doubt, a simple utterance shall certainly find me in the open arms of those who were nurtured from the teets of Ultra Magnus and BumbleBee. Cup tells it and I believe it:

Bah weep granna weep ninni bahn

And damnit, I mean it.

One more thing: This evening I was pinged by an AIM user who believed I was her best friend ‘Nikole’. After assuring her that I’d never, not in my wildest dreams, ever be mistaken for a ‘Nikole’ (the penis is a dead give-away, I am told) we determined that there is a slight differentiation between my SN and Nikole’s. It interests me that I have unwittingly taken part in a ‘wrong number’ call of the internet age. I shared a few minutes of small talk with Nikole’s best friend and was curious to find that we treated one another with a respect and familiarity that you just wouldn’t ever dare with someone calling you at a billon-o-clock at night and asking you if you were someone you clearly aren’t.

To me that says something about our evolving communicative system. That or the MSG from tonight’s Akira-Kurosawa-tastes-good-with-delivery event has made its way to my brain.

I have been on a quest since January to purchase and read Philip K. Dick’s entire body of published work. All told, there looks to be 52 publications that will cover most of this work: 44 novels and 8 collections of short stories.

I read quite a bit. Not like ‘stodgy boring has no life’ reads quite a bit, but like ‘hey, yeah, I read that too’ quite a bit. I stay away from pop pulp and gimmick books, and hover mostly around either the early days of science fiction or the early days of writing itself. No offense meant to those of you who enjoy your WB sitcom/teen dramas in book form, but when I read I need it to provide something different than the almost constant barrage of low quality consumer crap that is flung by Master Control and his corporate advert programs.

Novelized versions of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Andromeda or the fucking Gillmore Girls tickles not even one of my fancies. Not because it is crap but because that particular crap belongs on TV to be badly acted enough to entice 13yr old girls across the nation.

I am totally down with TV crap, though. Seriously. I have my own TV crap obsessions. For instance: The Headroom.

Max Headroom, despite what some computer-desk bound mouth breathers will tell you, was not an epic piece of contemporary art whose insight into humanity and the way of things was grossly ignored by the masses due to its way-ahead-of-its-time conceptual story telling elements.

Is it my favorite TV show ever? Yep. Do I have a 6ft tall poster of Max’s head(s) tacked to the wall behind me as I write this? Yes Sir/Madam.

It was TV crap, though, that knew it was TV crap and spent the whole crappy 40 minutes making fun of TV crap. I loved it because it was great TV crap.

Back to the books.

Dick’s novels will fark your head. They are so subtle in doing so, though, that it’s fucking crazy. Each little paperback purports to contain enough realism to pull you in and enough spaced out hippy flashback rolled in linoleum and slathered in sci-fi wasabi to put down even the most hardened reader of not-so-having-happened things.

Having never done any drug harder than Prevacid and having the uncanny ability to get totally pasted off of Banaca Spray, I can’t say I can relate to many of his trippy musings – but I think that adds something. I think it adds a level of fantasy as I can’t immediately relate to many if the situations he describes. Christ, I have to look up half of the pharmaceuticals he hasn’t made up and research most of the others which hover somewhere between chemical names smashed together and wholly new words somehow related to the experience. Toss some robots, flying cars, political corporate entities in and you’ve got a pretty nifty little experience.

One thing to keep your eye out for, if you decide that the Dick is right for you; That you want some Dick, as it were:

In every Philip K. Dick novel there is a point, and I honestly believe this is a situation entirely manufactured and that it plays out just as Dick intended, in which – after much dialogue or perhaps a bit of exposition that might lose the interest of the reader – an attractive, usually spacey, dark haired chick exposes her breasts to much ado. She has them lit with LEDs, painted, moving independent of her own body or growing right there in front of the protagonist’s eyes; It is a full on breast-fest for anywhere form 2-3 sentences to 2-3 paragraphs. At first I thought it was a fluke. How interesting that as soon as I started to drift out come the boobs. 18 novels later, I am convinced that the man was a genius. Is the book getting a bit long? You reading one of the few novels that breach 250 pages? Expect a second or even third helping of the arresting breast address.

Dick: He doesn’t like to say it is a convertible, he likes to say the titties is out.

Post (Apocalyptic) Script: For the mouth breathers, I present you this.