PINK LIGHT (really? Yeah, maybe)

A couple posts ago I went into the whys and wherefore my nervous breakdown: one very large piece was the shuttering of a huge book project I’d been working on in earnest for some years: a 200+ page comic book biography of Sci-Fi/ Surrealist writer Philip K. Dick (or PKD).

This post is about that, and also not.

It’s difficult to explain how fully I’d placed all of my eggs into this particular basket. It was the natural crux of a lot of things, but after 20+ years of being a cartoonist, I was faced with the brutal fact that in many ways, it wasn’t working. I’d take my 3 years to make whatever new book (I’m slow, unfortunately; which does not help) and then sell…500-1000 copies. Artistically and philosophically, that was ok with me, but you then get into the “real-world“ parts of it: how can you justify all that time and effort and get paid virtually nothing (if at all?). I had to face the fact that this was not a “career”, and not sustainable. And I’m a grown ass man: a husband, with kids and a mortgage. Something had to change.

Thankfully, there was a project that had been burning a hole in my skull for 20 years, and for once, it was something the “general reading public” knew about (this was extremely rare, for me). I decided: this is it. If you want to keep doing this, you have to make it more viable. You are 43 years old. This is your big push, put it all on the line.

And it truly wasn‘t a contrived or ”pandering” attempt to reach a larger audience (beyond the ‘zine/ comix/ weirdo world I largely existed within). It was a story that I thought was important, and I knew I could fucking crush it.

I also decided I needed to extend past my comfort zone/ community: try to hit the “big leagues”, even though I deeply distrust that shit and it fills me with fear. So I hit up some fancy NYC literary agents and frankly, they were all over it. No question that they could sell this thing, and get me enough of an advance to work on it full time until it was done (we’re talking $20-$30k, for a couple/few year’s work. Do the math.)

I started a Patreon to help me afford to really dig in at length (some of you probably supported that: thank you), and got to it. The work itself went great— the more research I did, and the deeper I got into what I was trying to do…the more the puzzle locked into place. I could feel it in my fucking soul. But the rest of it slowly disintegrated.

It’s hard to believe, even now. The first agent was cool, but things got weird and it didn't work out. So I got another one, who was known as a total shark, but I figured— he’s at the single biggest agency in NYC, and I know a guy he secured a 6 figure advance for. In for a penny, in for a pound. Long story short, he was…not cool. Right away landed something that looked promising, but that fell through. Then it got ugly. Gross and unethical. In the end (after I fired him for the 3rd time, because I’d fire him and he’d ignore it) I heard he was censured by whatever folks oversee literary agents.

I kept trying, but that plus….just the endless business bullshit, and still not knowing if, how or when the book would ever appear, or how I could continue to afford spending all these hours working on it AND, again, “all of my eggs in this basket”, personal/ financial/ my entire identity. Now I know— that was what killed it. I was so disgusted with the process that I lost whatever love and faith I had (which was significant) in the work itself.

And all this time, my marriage is also falling apart.

There is a scene from the book that haunted me at that time, and still does now. PKD had a very…messy life. 5 marriages, often absent in his kids’ lives… a lot of drama and chaos. But later in his life when he is (surprisingly, to Phil himself), successful, well-regarded, and actually somewhat rich, he is again about to attempt suicide. He describes in a letter to a friend being hopeless and alone in his condo. He walks to the bookshelf where his keeps copies of the (truly ridiculous amount of) books he’s written, stands in front of them and asks out loud:

“I created all of you; why can’t you help me now?”

It’s incredibly sad. And the (maybe inevitable) product of spending a life with your eggs in one basket (for better or worse). Considering where I was in that moment of my life (while also not knowing that this was just the opening act of losing my shit completely, and I’d soon decide to “not be a cartoonist anymore” altogether) I said “fuck it. I can’t end up in that position.”

So I took everything I’d done, threw it in a plastic bin, and hauled it out to the garage. That was it. I haven’t opened it since 2018.

It’s been very strange, since then: every once in a while people will ask me what happened to that project, and I just say “it’s dead”. They ask if I’ll ever finish it and I’d (totally honestly) say “no“. Not with anger or longing or sadness. Just nope. It doesn’t haunt me, I don’t think about it as a failure or whatever; it was fucking with my life and my sanity so I put it away. Both at that time and now, it was the correct call. But I’ve run into pieces of it (usually looking for something else), and every time I do, it’s…bizarre. Simultaneously feeling like “oh man, who did this?!?” and somewhat grudgingly “Jesus, this is really good.” But still no huge drive or desire to dive back in; a kind of free-floating, well— if you do, you will. If you don’t, that’s fine too.

Just a slow accrual of an almost disinterested interest. Until, a couple days ago, I ran into the publishing proposal I’d worked up (and honestly, I have virtually zero memory of putting it together) and read it. Then I went out into the garage and pulled out that bin.

Talk about a mind fuck. It weighed maybe 50 pounds: roughs, pages, research…hundreds upon hundreds of hours of work that I had almost completely erased from my mind. I’ll spare you the specifics, but the…way I decided to come at this project necessitated a real wonky jigsaw puzzle cumulative process in which it was (and, to a degree, still is) hard to tell how much of it was “done” and how much wasn’t. Of course, during the creation of it, I constantly felt like it wasn’t progressing fast or well enough, and “how much was left to do“ completely eclipsed any sense how much I’d actually got done.

But here was this box. An unimaginable (for me, now) amount of time and effort, still undeniably going someplace, and getting there; completely disorganized and out of order, chucked in a box and forgotten. This strange and vague sense of feeling as if it’d been done by someone else, and knowing that someone else was me. I’m noting that, here, with amazement of how us humans can shut it down like that, psychologically. I sure did, anyway.

So, for the past few days, I’ve been thinking about finishing this book. I’m not sure yet. Figuring it out.

But all this writing here is leading to…why I’m thinking of finishing it. It’s not for money or career or my identity or ego. I have precious few fucks to give about any of that, presently. That’s not why I started my book about Phil, or wanted to do it in the first place— that’s why it tanked.

It’s because the life of Philip K Dick (in conjunction with his body of work) is really instructive about now. I actually cannot think of anyone who nailed the writing on the wall for this horrific, surreal world we find ourselves trying to live in, on more levels than PKD. The questions he asked then seemed absurd and somewhat ridiculous, up til his death in ‘82; he knew this, acknowledged it (he was pretty damn funny, really), and also took it dead seriously. The “nature of reality” was something for sci-fi writers and the subculture of nerds who read them to ponder (and probably folks cleaning their weed on a King Crimson gatefold LP), as was distinguishing between what is real and what is human, or how we allow ourselves to be overtaken by authoritarian and inhuman personalities, structures, and psychologies. What is real and the degree to which we create the “reality” around us. What is actually true, and how can you tell?

Not so funny, now.

“Are we living in a simulation?” was a freaky question only Sci-fi could countenance, by way of a trashy paperback; it was too silly for the egg heads, philosophers, and “real” intellectuals.

Now a shit ton of the people in Silicon Valley who sort of (if you’re feeling generous) control what we see and feel through the technology they created (and we are addicted to) believe that exact thing. As does one of the billionaires recently calling the shots in the US Government. Christ, people— it IS a sci-fi book.

The degree to which PKD saw this stuff in advance, and his obsessive questioning around it was pertinent in 2014 when I began this, and has increased exponentially in 2025. Many of those questions are now very likely matters of life and death, and maybe the fact that we ignored them, or treated them like the garbage paper they were printed on is why we ended up here.

It’s a surreal, stupid, insane joke that the whole world is running with (or from). It’s not funny or cute, or a movie you can turn off, a book you can put away and stop reading.

So that is why I’m thinking about finishing it, now. Because it deserves finishing, and these ideas deserve wrestling with. We’ll see (And I’ll let you know).

But in the meantime, here’s the intro sequence. In the spirit of PKD and not downplaying freakiness when it shows up, the whole thing came to me at once, in the middle of the night, sometime in the late 90’s: it even had the backing music (“Our Exquisite Replica Of Eternity” by Gastr Del Sol, in case you’re wondering. But it probably should be Wagner. PKD loved his Wagner).

Here you go. Enjoy.