PKD/ RED TV

It's only now, on this 2nd go-around with the PKD book, that I'm realizing some of the reasons I'm doing it again. Some are the same, some are different.

As I progress (and it's been slower than I'd like), I'm increasingly amazed by Phil himself, in different ways than I was in 2018. Also I'm more...annoyed with some of the shit he pulled. Maybe you shouldn't say that about the subject of your biography, but then again maybe you should. He was a flawed human, same as everyone else. I think that's important, too.

But, for all my annoyance there is the equal reaction of watching his brain operate. Both in his writing and in interviews/ speaking extemporaneously, it's routinely astonishing to see his constant probing, every "normal" idea mixed up with a wild possibility, then discarded in the next sentence with a new set of dicombobulations. Maybe (ok, often) out there, but never, ever, stupid.

And it made me remember a thing. It's actually something I'm not sure I've told anyone out loud, ever.

So, this is...Jesus, let me do the math: 38 years ago. Really.

I swung some magic in high school and got to finish out my senior year (through an exchange deal via a nominally Catholic (!!) college in Duluth) living in a small village in Ireland. The state had a program that paid for some of it, I had money from working at the car wash, and my folks got the rest, bless 'em.

But yes: 17 years old, turned loose and living with college kids in a village of 200 souls on the western coast of Ireland? Pretty damn great (Other than the fact that I got even better at drinking, and added smoking to my repertoire, both of which...well, you know.)

So I did that for 3-4 months (my ONLY college education; I got a fucking A in the "History Of Catholicism" class, taught by a perpetually hung over priest. I liked him a lot. His class was fascinating as...heck), then hitchhiked aimlessly around Ireland for a week, made my way over to England, (eventually London, where I saw the Pixies play their brand new Dolittle record) and flew home from there. Maybe it was 6 days? 10? I can't remember.

There were a lot of...adventures, hitching around Ireland in 1988. I should probably write them all down (maybe just for myself), but here's the pertinent one for right now. Of course, the specifics are hazy, but what I remember most clearly is that I was a wrung-out mess. 5 (6? 7?) days of hitching; sometimes rides, sometimes none (for 6 hours), trying to navigate shitty (paper) maps and where best to hang for a lift, which when it happened was sometimes silent, sometimes weird, sometimes kind, and sometimes completely nuts (and drunk). I was also young and stupid as hell, so one of my last lifts had left me halfway across the country from where I needed to catch my ferry the next day– leaving me fucked. I can't actually remember how it ended up working out, in the end, but it DID.

Now that I'm writing it out, I'm remembering this was due to the aforementioned 2 drunk nut jobs who heard my plight – after slamming on the brakes doing 80 on a tiny 2-lane road to pick me up– and just decided to (drunk) drive me (completely out of their way) halfway to where I needed to be; BUT, we had to stop at every 3rd bar and they got me wasted along with them, then at the end they demanded I take their rental car the rest of the way myself and then "just drive it off a fucking cliff". I told them this was a bad idea, but thank you.

I got to the ferry. Or, close enough.

But we didn't sleep, I think, and I was in a constant sub-panic that these very nice but shit-faced maniacs were going to kill us all (what was I going to do, ask them to slow down?) and I feel like I hadn't eaten anything in 30 hours, outside of...beer.

So I get to this hostel, dangerously exhausted.

This part isn't hazy at all, though: my memory is very clear: I'm at said youth hostel, and out of my mind from lack of...everything. It was not in a city– a village somewhere, pretty isolated (I thought initially it was in Wales, but upon inspection that can't be correct. Right?) And there was only 1 or 2 other people there, so it was quiet and still; everyone was friendly, but it was a sort of serious, stoic, restrained friendly. Which was fine by me. The woman minding the place told me to take the little path around the side, it goes down to the ocean. So I did. It was too early to crash for real.

I can't be sure, but I think this was when it kicked in.

I remember it vividly– by myself in this tiny little rocky cove, the ocean beautiful and slightly foggy, evening on its way. Sat by myself, and started to...hallucinate?

I think it started getting weird then, but, I'm positive it did later, lying in my bunk.

What I was seeing, eyes both open and shut, was these images– like on a TV screen (in both look and feel), but in black and red.

The thing is, from the get-go, I was 100% sure that...I was watching something. From somewhere. That these images (film clips? Videos?) were absolutely not being generated by my own brain. That they were...I don't know...transmissions? They were too real to be hallucinations, and they felt like TV; there was a weird old texture, and those bursts of static/ rolling visual noise specific to old stations losing the signal (you had to mess with the antenna to get it back). There was also garbled audio/ talking, as well, with a lot of distortion and interference. And it wasn't in a language I knew. Maybe 10, 20 minutes? I don't know. I can still remember some of it, to this day.

It was very, very freaky. And lying there in that hostel– yeah. Unsettling.

So freaky, in fact, that I have never spoken about it to anyone. It's never happened again.

And of course, as you get older, you get more explanation and rationalization– well yes, you were mentally and physically past exhaustion. That can happen. And I knew that at the time, too. But somehow, in all these years, it's never cleared the hurdle. That's not what it was. Now, all signs point to that it WAS just something I was hallucinating. It is, I readily admit, easily explainable in those terms. The circumstances would definitely and absolutely point to that. And maybe that's what it was. It's certainly possible.

It's a thing that, rationally and consciously, as reasonable human, has no explanation. And also, 38 years later, there is little doubt in my head (on a visceral level) that it's exactly what happened. It wasn't coming from me and my brain, period.

The thing is, I've been in that state plenty of times in the ensuing 38 years. You're sort of like that 50% of the time, on tour (especially in the early years). Or up for 42 hours working on a comic, having consumed nothing but coffee. I've hallucinated before and realized later that I was, indeed, hallucinating. And I've also, at various times, been on drugs. I'm not all that smart of a person.

Nothing like that day. It's not as if it plagues me, or is a mystery I've been trying to solve all these years, or get to the bottom of– once a decade (or so) I remember it and just think : now what the fuck was that all about?

Instead of the actual rational thing, which is taking it at face value and trying to assess it  AS "unexplainable", you have to discount it and....never mention it to anyone else, ever, because then you would be a crazy person. I like to think of myself as a rational, reasonable person with a pretty decent bullshit detector– I like weirdos, but...there are lines. I once broke up with a girl on the spot and walked out in the middle of breakfast when she related to me her rationale for constructing an actual tin foil hat (I'm not proud of it, I'm just...saying. The hat didn't seem reasonable for the circumstances.). Metaphysical and mystical mumbo-jumbo has always been pretty anathema for me (For better or worse.)

But. This thing happened. And i still think it happened.

So then we get back to Philip K Dick. Events like this were the gas for his engine.

In fact, something very similar happened to him during his "2-3-74" experiences: he saw visions for 5 hours that weren't coming from him.*

For my money, there are people every so often who just...have antenna to pick up things other humans don't. Or can't. I touched on this in an earlier post, but this aspect of PKD is even more apparent now than it was 8 years ago. Lovecraft (who I dug into– for the first time--a couple years back and was, in many ways it seems, a real prick) could access this sense of Cosmic Horror that cuts through any rational thought...I've never read anyone else who could hit that note, touch that unexplainable thing. I could say it (in very different ways) about David Lynch. Alice Coltrane. Jack Kirby. Prince. Take your pick. Its a conduit to some other thing. Something beyond explanation, and rationality.

But (like all the other people I just mentioned), PKD also cultivated it. He got to that spot because he valued it, was on the lookout for it, and wasn't afraid of it. Didn't judge it. "This is freaky, I don't understand it, and I'm running away from it"? More like this is freaky: I take it at face value, and I'm going to go hard and ride it as far as it'll take me. And, let's be frank– he loved it.

As dubious a practice as that can be– there is absolutely something important about it. PKD's absurdist/ surrealist (often half-joking) extrapolations of "the future" have proved to be....more concrete and actual than anyone (including Phil, I think) could have possibly imagined.

I've heard, over and over, people's beef with PKD being that sure he's great, but he was such a "bad writer". And I guess I understand what people mean to a certain extent, but for me it's (and I probably use this analogy far too often) like saying you don't like The Cramps because they were shitty musicians. If that's what you're listening for, you're missing the entire point. Even within his "genre"– J.G. Ballard was a far "better writer" than PKD, as was Ursula K. LeGuin (who, I should say, was and is a total hero to me), and some of their books are stone cold masterpieces (The Dispossessed, for Christ's sakes!!) but...they didn't Talk To God (As PKD felt he...probably did. Or might have. Whether or not this is actually true just illustrates my point). That wasn't the antenna they were flying. They were generally cogent and reasonable. Things made sense. Those lines in the sand were malleable, but they were evident.

My guess is that you've had something happen in your life, too. Not a "red TV" or whatever, but some moment or event that is just utterly unexplainable. Maybe once, maybe more than once. I don't know. And, like me, you've thought "well I should just keep that one to myself".

But if that happens with virtually everyone (even once), it speaks to something universal, right? To the fact that there IS shit going on, all the time, that we don't have a hope of comprehending. It flies against everything we're told to believe in– that life, and the things that happen in it, fall within certain limits of rationality and causality. And if it falls outside those boundaries, we should either dismiss, ignore, or deny it through sheer force of will. Or crush it.

Why? Because if we cant understand it, things get real scary, real quick.

That desire or need to make it make sense, to have an explanation for everything--some answer, some rugged individual solution...that's fucking irrational. It presupposes that we understand how everything works. And we do not. We (and scientists who devote their lives to understanding such things) don't even know how Quantum Physics works, exactly (only that somehow, it does), but it's come to define the invisible engine of modern existence. Ask your cell phone.

And that's the maddening thing about PKD: he'd follow some "crazy" tangent or idea, but he'd do it critically; with intelligence, openness, and a willingness to follow it to it's logical (or illogical) conclusion. Because he needed to investigate it. Not understand, necessarily, but question it, rigorously and exhaustively. And finally, he'd say "Ok I've got it. This is it."

But here's the critical part: if it didn't hold up to his criteria of viability, if that reality then fell apart in his hands, OR IF IT WAS UNTRUE, INHUMAN AND CRUEL, he'd abandon it and move on. The next day, the next minute, whenever. On to the next question. And the next.

For all of his eccentricities, for PKD this was not armchair metaphysical flexing, or empty philosophical chess games. It was life and death, for him (and everything else). It wasn't AN important question, it was the ONLY important question. The reason we're alive in the first place. And yeah, maybe this post is the same as what PKD did every night, for the last years of his life: spinning hundreds of pages of theories and questions, no answers. Millions (really) of words about this stuff, all valuable but in the end– he was just sitting by himself, in his condo. In real, concrete, actionable terms: not much. Words on paper. Not everyone lives there, and not everyone should. That's absolutely true. But then again– he also wasn't doing any harm. And those ideas on paper, those transmissions, (for me at least) are the polar opposite of "harm".

There's contradictions here that I can't seem to wrap my head around or explain entirely.

But then, maybe that's the entire point: it all really boils down to cultivating an awareness and ability to ask questions, whether or not they are "allowed". And the willingness to be wrong, in the service of not doing harm.

Which, I would submit, is a damn sight better than the "normal" thing (circa 2025, and what breaks my heart every god damned day):

This is my unchanging reality, and the reality of how the world works. Whether or not it actually WORKS (or harms anyone else). It's brutal, shitty, based on some deep denial, and I'm sticking to it. Anything that challenges that reality must be discounted, ignored, (or mocked and ridiculed) then probably wiped off the face of the earth by whatever means necessary. That is how we do it.

People are being massacred for this shit. At this very moment.

I mean, who's crazy now?

*and no. I read my first PKD bio in '90 or so. So I had no idea.

Ok and finally: just for kicks, here's a couple more images. Whenever I'd hit a rut and wasn't sure what to draw next, I'd just do a reproduction of one of PKD's many, many book covers. Drawing these are fun. You can just sort of turn off your brain and dig in.

And this one– for any of you who read FOLRATH, this is the paperback edition (but not the actual book; lost that and had to re-buy it) of Transmigration I scored in Butte, MT while killing time waiting to catch my next bus ride.