OBAMA/BIDEN OR DIE!

EMERGENCY! PLEASE VOTE FOR OBAMA/BIDEN NOW OR ON NOVEMBER 4TH!

TEN GOOD REASONS TO VOTE DEMOCRATIC BLUE MY FRIENDS:

1. WE NEED TO GROW THE MIDDLE CLASS!

2. THEIR PLAN FOR HEALTH CARE WILL WORK!

3. TAX CUTS FOR 95% OF AMERICANS WILL HELP THE SHRINKING MIDDLE CLASS & ALL WORKING PEOPLE!

4. IT`S TIME TO END THE WAR IN IRAQ NOW!

5. THE FEDERAL DEFICIT IS RUINING THE ECONOMY-WE MUST SHRINK IT JUST AS BILL CLINTON DID!

6. WE HAVE TO STOP OUTSOURCING JOBS, & CREATE JOBS HERE IN THE U.S! OBAMA HAS A PLAN FOR THIS!

7. THINK AL GORE IN TERMS OF THE TYPES OF NEW JOBS THAT CAN BE CREATED IN ENERGY & THE HIGH TECH INDUSTRY!

8. OBAMA`S IDEAS ON IMMIGRATION ARE RIGHT!

9. WE MUST BEGIN TO IMPROVE OUR IMAGE IN THE WORLD! OBAMA/BIDEN CAN DO THIS, BUT IT WILL TAKE MUCH TIME! WE HAVE TO STOP THESE ILLEGAL INVASIONS INTO SYRIA!

10. THE ECONOMY WILL GRADUALLY IMPROVE, BUT IT WILL TAKE SOME TIME! THE KEY IS BY LETTING THE LOWER MIDDLE CLASS DO A LITTLE BETTER. THEN THE WHOLE ECONOMY WILL START TO PERCOLATE! THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED LATE IN BILL CLINTON`S SECOND TERM! THIS IS WHY I STARTED TO DO BETTER THROUGH THE U.S. STOCK MARKET!

MCCAIN/PALEN ARE WRONG ON THE ECONOMY, WRONG ON THE WAR IN IRAQ, & WRONG ON ENERGY!

VOTE OBAMA/BIDEN ON NOV 4TH, OR EARLIER!

A TRUE TALE OF WOE-GHOUL(S) OF THE OLDE WEST

A TRUE TALE OF WOE-GHOUL(S) OF THE OLDE WEST by John G. Kays

“I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now green; they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed-melting and flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that consequently my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring.” The Time Machine-H. G. Wells

This is a true tale of woe. The particulars are undeniable shards of indicia, yet the rub of this perplexing interlude is subject to pendulums of speculation. If I had any notion of what was about to happen to me this Hallows Eve, I would have chartered a flight to Bermuda, cashed in my 401 K, or what is left of it, and taken an early retirement, a leave of absence from this ignoble planet that we call home. Yet the human race craves to hear my wrenching tale, while even knowing that their fates are carved as pumpkin fur party. Eek! Gadzooks! Yet wait, here crawls a freak, a ghoulish effigy, a Badman out-of-time-me sees a puff of fancy, a pipedream, my chummy compadre? Doomed, doomed, thus quivers my throat!

`Twas a crisp clear autumn day in the year 2008, the month was October, the day was the 31st. An infrequent breeze did coarse through the room, and openings in the blinds saw whisking palms gently swaying. Merrily, I lit a candle to a newly carved Jack-O-Lantern smiling wryly and arranged decorative, fresh candy bowls for the trick-er-treaters who would chance my abode this very eve. Eagerly, I unwrapped my HP Pavilion dv9000 notebook from the Fed Express package and began to set up shop for my wireless laboratory that would soon take me to new places. Green light go, all systems tilt-a-whirl, knobs on eleven! The antenna waves began to function and I surfed the net for spine-tingling stories to pass some idle hour.

I peered into the notebook and this scene came forth: it was the parking lot behind a humble mall in Dallas, Texas, known as Northtown Mall. The focus is on a yellow 1966 Ford Mustang, the best model ever, and one that resembles my very own, used to drive around the town in my youth. It was closely parked to one of the entrances to the mall towards the back of the building. Why was I seeing only vehicles in the lot from the 1970s, such as Pintos, Ford Broncos, or Pontiac Firebirds?

Screen fog clouds then the ‘camera’ trots swiftly into the mall, then pans into the AMC Northtown Six Theater, an earliest version of multi-cinema complexes that now crowd our American landscape. You should know, I was gainfully employed as an usher for the Cubs-share of my latter days in high school (1967-1971). The eye then races down (I do not know what it is) the lobby (replay The Shining again for reference) past the refreshment stand and into screen IV where the feature that is playing is Phantasm, considered by most to be a classic, with its campy antics of flying metal blades and the spooky Tall Man mortician cruising in hearses, snatching teens, and turning the dead into dwarf zombies in order to take over the world.

Now skip back to a young man munching corn and hugging a soft drink-grimacing to the shenanigans of supernal simulacre. He is a thin lad with flowing chestnut locks and coke-bottle glasses as thick as the iron girders of the Empire State Building. He is wearing a navy blue sports coat, white wrinkled dress shirt, bell-bottom blue slacks, and cordovan weejins lacking socks. As I witnessed this on the notebook canopy, my mouth opened in awe, this was me back in time. I was watching myself at the premiere of Phantasm, March 28th, 1979, at Northtown Six Theater. The specifics of the event began to flood back into my mind, Goosebumps popped up in my craggy joints.

This was a chronicle from my life. It was real, I actually did attend this movie at this now defunct mall, that is at present an abandoned shell for dubious flea markets and traveling carnivals with one star ratings. But folks, I had just gone back in time some twenty-nine years to a frivolous, yet pertinent event from an earlier chapter in my life. A pitch of fever for vagaries, a trance came over me, what would happen next? I watched Phantasm once again on Netflix to put meat on the bones of memory.

The laptop curtain blurred and cleared prodigiously in my chamber, the commotion desisted and I observed some relevant entries in the bottom right hand corner of the flatface. It read: May 25th, 1871, Abilene, Kansas. I recognized this as the last stop on the Chisholm Trail, a frenzied cash-in cowtown where law and order had taken a vacation to Saskatchewan! Frame the scene, two men approach each other with harried mugs. The drunken one sputtered: “I`m just taking in the town.” The other blasted, “Take those pistols off. I arrest you.” Lo and behold, this was Wild Bill Hickok, I recognized his countenance from rusty photos!

The young, spunky stranger pulled his firearms from his scabbard and quickly rolled the guns over in his hands and stuck em in Wild Bill`s face. He curses the legend as a long-haired scoundrel, then he says, “This is my fight and I`ll kill the first man that fires a gun.” Oddly, the two made up, shook hands, patted their respective backs, then paced to the Apple Jack Saloon fur an eye-opener. I grimaced as the screen fogged up big time. Cognizance filled my brain, I pulled impacting data from storage-this was John Wesley Hardin`s infamous Border Roll on Wild Bill Hickok. The event seemed real; the cobwebs of time dissipated, sheen returned to the dusty memory.

Several hours went by and I doled out trick `r treats to costumed revelers ambling from door to door. Nervously, I festooned my condo with orange and black streamers, to take the edge off, you see, but the shocking revelations, the recollection of the cyber-loop, echoed through my brain and bones (which shook with the timidity of a skeleton dance of death). After much gloom and off-the-map marveling, I returned to my experimental chamber for encounters unexplained-a diminishment of cowardice pushed me forth to my station (a refuge for unspeakable chimera).

I deposited my paperback copy of The Tommyknockers on the nightstand and turned down the chiming clocks ringing on The Dark Side of the Moon vinyl platter. I returned to my spanking new notebook and read a ghost story or two-one on theSOP.org about the Bell Witch put me in a moony mood, so I fetched a steaming kettle of green tea and fixed my eyes on a short story, Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe in a yellowing, though lovely, antediluvian volume. Mysteriously, fog began to appear on the edges of the screen; did I have extra pork-barrel options in this box that I was unaware of? Data in the bottom right hand corner displayed Friday, August 1st, 1873. Locale: Albuquerque, Texas. Clarity returned to the screen.

I could make out a Blacksmith Shop; one man was getting off a horse with a double-barreled shotgun in hand. The other cowpoke was cocking a pistol and aiming it towards a man down the dusty street who was sporting a knife. The man with the blade uttered: “Hands up, you son of a bitch!” The ornery dudes commenced to plug `em with six-shooter balls and buckshot. The man tumbled to the dirt stone dead and bleeding from countless orifices. The killers fled nonchalantly and my display began to obfuscate yet again. Later I was able to piecemeal exactly what I had seen.

The electronic partition clouded for a moment than began to rewind rapidly. Scenes changed dramatically as people, trees, and buildings whipped back through time and got younger. Finally, focus emerges and on the right hand bottom of the screen digits are noted: El Paso 8/19/1895. I can see we are in front of the Acme Saloon on San Antonio Street-downtown El Paso. The time on the screen is 11 PM and a cantankerous looking cowpoke walks through the saloon doors, and begins to pull a pistol out of his side holster. A drunken man with a mustache who is playing dice gets up, wobbly, tossing dice down the spit-clean bar and utters to his compadre, “Brown, you`ve got four sixes to beat.”

The man with the silver star pinned to his vest walked four steps through the smoky pallor and pointed the pistol to the back of the woozy gambler`s head and fired. Down tumbled the loner, a gaping wound to the back of the head. The limping lawman pumped two more slugs into the fallen cowboy then calmly left the scene. The screen began to mist as the drama was told. A chilly draft wafted through the room. Strains of Stan Jones` classic Ghost Riders in the Sky piped through the Altec Lansings. “Their brands were still on fire and their hooves were made of steel, their horns were black and shiny and their hot breath he could feel…Yippee-yi-ya, yippee-yi-yo, Ghost riders in the sky.”

I was still soaking this all in. My eyes danced over to the mantle while the clock struck midnight. Antique photographs of ancestors leered out at me as if they were still alive. And there was a shot of me from around the time of the ‘Phantasm incident’ at the old familiar mall called Northtown. Troubling too was a cowboy menagerie on the mantle-a pistol-packing outlaw shootin` straight at me! My eyes turned back to the shroud where steamy vapors began to part; scenes transformed rapidly-buildings disappeared, old men morphed to garland-bearing youth, Starbucks vanished in a puff, and Wal-Marts vaporized to desolate prairies.

As the notebook began to clear up I indexed the data in the bottom right: High Noon, Sunday, August 27th, 1995-El Paso, Texas-Concordia Cemetery, to be exact. A little scuffle was taking place, and I could hear their words. These citizens had a disinterment order to confiscate the remains of one John Hardin, and return him to his hometown of Nixon. But the historian Leon Metz got an injunction signed by a local judge restraining the digging up of Hardin`s charnel remains. After a few minutes the parties dispersed; the Nixon bunch were grumpy and cursing for the failure of their mission. Later I would find out John`s position on where he intended to rest all his days.

In a flash the apparition sprung out magically from the mini-computer veil and floated languorously around my condo like a busy bumble bee sniffing honey. Remember the fairies in Disney`s Sleeping Beauty, for this was the type of projection that I beheld. A day-glow green veneer emanated out of the ghost bubble eidolon. My jaw dropped, eyes bugged-out, and my face turned a slime green. Perspiration streamed down my cheeks and I quaked in terror anticipating otherworldly utterances from this gruesome umbra. The ungodly gaseous ghost got in my face (this petrified me to stone) and bespoke some words that warbled sinuously from some echo chamber of a Poe tale of horror. These creaky vocal chords sounded distant like white zombies in a New Orleans voodoo factory.

“I am what remains of John Hardin. I loathe every Yankee carpetbagger that ravages the hallowed grounds of Texas. I never killed but in self-defense. Though it is true, I once shot a man simply for snoring. Let my remains stay in El Paso until eternity! I have revealed these scenes unto you that you might see the truth instead of the legend. However, I am the greatest gunslinger that has ever roamed the Wild West. My story is wrought from Reconstruction, the darkest time in our nation`s history. Tell my tale to the world that people will see the travesties and contradictions that confounded me. I was a victim of Lincoln, that scoundrel! While yet it is true, fifty men bit the dust from my pistol lead, each of them Yankee lovin` devils got their just deserve.” He gave out a shrill laugh and disappeared into the ether. A screamin` genie out-a-the-bottle had just haunted me!

The next day I gathered my wits after fitful slumbers and noxious dreams put bags under my eyes and cobwebs in my crevices. The theorems of science were ‘closely watched trains’, but I needed badly to catch the metro daily express to sanity! I knew what had happened to me, so I will tell you. My notebook had turned into a conduit to the past. It was programmed into a time machine, possibly by the combination of technologies at the disposal of necromancing wizards. I wasn`t looking at an old movie, nor was this a reenactment of the glory days of the Old West. This was a Sherman and Peabody out-of-body experience where I had seen pivotal events in real time.

These did not look like dwellings derived from the movie sets of Hollywood, say culled from the days of Tom Mix or the early flicks of the Duke, Mister John Wayne. No motion cameras were around in the 1870s. My best conjecture is that these were real time-loops summoned by my modem and projected onto the notebook terminal. Please understand, these were not instant playbacks, but rather the actual action itself happening-live, you see!

This is very hard to understand. I`ll give an example. Remember, there is a distinction between a memory and the actual event. Think of the shooting of Oswald by Jack Ruby; what you have seen over and over again in the past forty-seven years is a film tape of the shooting. It looks real but it is not. The real shooting resides in a specific time slot: 11:14 November 24th, 1963, and in a particular space spot, the basement of the Dallas Police Department. In my case, I truly went back in a time machine to some salient events in the life of John Hardin.

Let me summarize exactly what transpired. First, I returned to my premiere viewing of the cult classic Phantasm. Second, I experienced the Border roll of Hardin and the famous confrontation with Wild Bill Hickok in Abilene, Kansas. Third, I was right there when the killers took down Sheriff Jack Helm-this was most ghastly indeed! Fourth, I was an eye-witness to the murder of John Hardin by the two-timin` Constable John Selman in El Paso. Fifth, I saw the altercation at the graveside of our gunman; this is divined from recent recollections, sundry newspaper articles, that are unsavory souvenirs of infamy and violence. Lastly (sixth), I had my own personal visitation by the sheer, translucent poltergeist of one Hardin. This was a historical event, I can swear on it! This was not a memory or made up, but rather a newly conjured banshee conceived from fresh advances in computer science. A new necromancy has emerged along the lines of H. G. Wells and his nifty Time Machine. This explanation can not be proved, but no other possibility can be plausible. Rebellion against science is unheard of, so immutable facts are for the offering.

Lazy days went by, and day to day obligations were performed. The trash was taken out, the dishes cleaned, the bills paid. Nervous palpitations began to spring up. Itches and sweating, clammy sensations, fears, unbalanced humours, denial, mood swings, and the questioning of science all played their hands. Nothing out of the ordinary, mind you, but one rainy night I looked into the crystal ball (the notebook) and saw a flashing bright orange pumpkin in flagrant animation and the chilly strains of John Carpenter`s Halloween theme went blasting through the speakers! I tossed up my hands, gesticulated in consternation and rattle chanted: “I better not ‘pal around’ with ghostly western outlaws anymore!” Nothing ever happened again for evermore.

A GHOST STORY OF JOHN WESLEY HARDIN

This is the actual GHOST OF JOHN WESLEY HARDIN! I am preparing a chilly, yet true account of his gossamer visits to me, by way of a modern machine that acts as a conduit to paranormal waves of spirited energy. Be prepared to read my story about one week before HALLOWEEN! You can be sure that he`s an apparition because you can see through him; transparency of his image is obvious. Ladies & gentleman, this is not a stunt, it is not hocus pocus, no charade my friend, nor has trick photography been harnassed to cajole you into believing that this is an otherworldly spirit. That it is honestly a ghost, you can bank on it! I chill at the prospect of more visitations, but no doubt, more will come to pass! This gunslinger, this murderer is restless, maybe angry, & wants to still preside on our times, for reasons unknown. I will peck out my story with fear & trembling but will truthfully chronicle the path of the reckless killer with keen acumen . But no use in stirring him up to the point of harrowing hauntings. Of endless campaigns or spooky encounters! SO PLEASE PREPARE YOURSELF FOR THE GREATEST GHOST STORY EVER TOLD JUST TWO WEEKS HENCE!

*If you haven`t already read my piece on Philip K. Dick`s, Flow My Tears, please do so now!

The Potatoes - Dig Their Okay Sound!

Boy this is very groovy art for this art cassette!

RING IN THE NEW!

I thought I`d post on my new HP Pavilian laptop, now that I finally am getting this little wireless machine going!
1. BARRACK OBAMA IS GOING TO BE THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!
2. Austin City Limits Music Festival totally ruled!
3. Best: Gnarls Barkley, Foo Foo Fighters, Jacob Dylan, Plant/Krauss, David Byrne, & Manu Chau
4. Let`s hope we can survive this deep recession caused by flawed economic principles of GB.

AUSTIN CITY LIMITS MUSIC FESTIVAL

I`m actually going to ACL this year, and having a blast. Friday`s highlight was Manu Chao. I got their CD. They`re from Spain and have a very full sound with two percussionists. Yesterday I saw John Foferty and Robert Plant & Allison Craus and could not believe how good it was. Please refer back to my review of Raising Sand). We`ll see what`s good today, & I`ll provide a complete report soon.

FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID

IN FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID PHILIP K. DICK IS A NOUVEAU-NOSTRADAMUS PAINTING OUR FUTURE WITH SUCH TRENDS AS IDENTITY THEFT, GOVERNMENT SURVELLANCE, AND THE REVIVAL OF VINYL RECORDS. By John G. Kays

“The exclusiveness of space, we`ve learned, is only a function of the brain as it handles perception. It regulates data in terms of mutually restrictive space units. Millions of them. Trillions, theoretically, in fact. But in itself, space is not exclusive. In fact, in itself, space does not exist at all.” Phil Westerburg-LA Police Agency Coroner

It is suddenly the year 1988, (fourteen years into the future from the publishing date of 1974), October 11th to be exact, and Jason Taverner, a television star and pop singer with 30 million viewers is casually cruising home in his Rolls flyship, after taping his show, with his present girlfriend, Heather Hart, a starlet in her own right. Oddly enough, the very next day on October 12th, Jason awakens natty-eyed in a shabby, bug-riddled shack-of-a-hotel, and nobody knows him anymore, whatsoever. Zilch, nada, caputski, nie one living soul has so much as even heard of him. He is now a living zero, and neither his business agent, his girlfriend, nor any of his 30 million fans have any clue as to who he really is? The rest of this Science Fiction novel, penned by Philip K. Dick, is the curvilinear journey of this ‘nobody’ scrapping vapidly for his former famous self.

The frame for this story is a United States that has transformed into a totalitarian state after emerging from a “Second Civil War.” Traces of democracy emerge ever so latently, but a most sturdy police infrastructure is in place, with the National Guard (“Nats”) and US police force (“pols”), identity checkpoints, and national data banks operating smoothly to monitor its citizens for transgressions. Previously, the black population has been pruned voraciously via sterilization and the student population is burrowed like gophers, entrenched that is, in sub-terrestrial kibbutz units `neath most major universities. Furthermore, other so deemed dissidents are incarcerated in forced-labor camps, that have in recent memory witnessed altering states of liberation and oppression, depending on prevailing political winds. In the current decade (mid 1980s) society is chilling ever so slightly as hints of democracy sprout up shyly. Blacks are more respected now a days yet public affairs are laced with indiscretions, such as incestuous relations and flagrant drug abuse. The residing government is a dictatorship with a “Director” and police marshals and generals in place to owl-eye any iota of civil discord.

The machinations of plot are, in design, the journey of Jason Taverner to retrieve his frittered identity. Also, the Police Academy in LA, and especially the Police General Felix Buckman, are utterly confounded by the fact that they have no info on Jason in their central data banks. The Police General is convinced that the data has been misplaced. “Somewhere, some obscure place, he`s overlooked a microdocument of a minor nature. We`ll keep searching until we find it.” Much of this SF novel provides vivid descriptions of the police surveillance apparatus in all its refinement. A specific fact in chapter one, that piqued my interest, was when Marilyn Mason, a jilted lover, hurled the Callisto cuddle sponge on Jason, for his womanizing ways. Did this in some way contribute to his loss of identity that appears in chapter two? I sense that there is a connection, but am not able to draw a line between the dots.

One thing I liked most about this book was the assortment of flaky characters that pop up in the story. Kathy Nelson comes to mind; she`s an expert forger who creates some docs for Mister Taverner to aid him in clearing checkpoints. “Most of it called for pol-nat standard postcurfew tags, with thumbprints and photographs and holographic signatures, and everything with short expiration dates.” Kathy is a state-of-the-art forger alright, and she is only nineteen years old, but she is also an informer for the state police and can`t be trusted. When Jason takes her to a tacky restaurant she freaks out and commences to scream. This results in her being thrown out by the management. Then there is Inspector McNulty; he is a yes man to Felix Buckman, but does much of the dirty work in terms of investigating the case. Later I`ll touch on some of the other big players.

I love Philip K. Dick`s style, in spite of its awkwardness, for he is a brazen ‘paperback writer’ that is not afraid to slap down some words on his trusty typewriter and let them exist on parchment. He uses a lot of snappy, corny dialogue and one may think of hard boiler stuff, such as Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, but come to think of it, they may be a mite more arty than PKD. I had much to choose from, but I`ll give you this quote `cuz it will no doubt flip you out (from chapter 27)! “Someday your story, the ritual and shape of your downfall, may be made public, at a remote future time when it no longer matters. When there no more forced-labor camps and no more campuses surrounded by rings of police carrying rapid-fire submachine guns and wearing gas masks that make them look like great-snouted, huge-eyed root-eaters, some kind of noxious lower animal.” Images of the 1968 Democratic Convention immediately popped into my head!

Anachronisms are welcome weeds in Flow My Tears, a round peg in a square hole is a good fit in this case. As you mull over the leaflets you get a surreal sensation; is this the ‘Disco Era’ of the 1970s or a ‘Brave New World’ of the future? A little of both essentially. Citations of vinyl records herein are mondo. “Carrying the enormous record albums he ran back to the house.” And: “He lifted at the lid of the phonograph but it wouldn`t open.” Wisely, PKD is prophesizing the revival of vinyl record albums! Here`s another hoot for pasé-isimoniciousness. “Does she still read the Book-of-the-Month?” And good old reel-to-reel tapes still peek (or rotate) from the pages. “Moodily, General Buckman opened the third drawer of the large desk and placed a tape-reel in the small transport he kept there.” Let`s not leave out the trusty retro-video conferencing that pops up here and there. The out-of-time ephemera that occupy this landscape are comic conundrums that tax our linear perceptions of history.

Jason Taverner is a genetically engineered six, an older model, a crooner, TV star, and a womanizer. I picture him looking like say a Pat Boone or Glen Campbell during the 1970s. White shoes, curly golden locks, a glassy smile, he pipes pop songs through a microphone to 30 millions viewers. PKD uses him as a conduit to channel theories of identity loss. Taverner is a breathing torso of Andy Warhol`s fleeting fifteen minutes of fame. It is noticeable, Jason`s robotic and predictable, a cartoon for Dick`s imaginative playland. Heather Hart is a six also, a cool movie starlet who digs Jason, and yet she is the object of a plot twist that could well be the crux of the matter. This must be coveted at this ink spot. Mary Ann Dominic is a suburban unknown soldier who café-hops with Jason through some troubling moments and is a skilled potter whose ceramic vases become cherished ware for the museums of the future.

Paranoia is the primary mood or tone of this paperback. Jason spends most of his time attempting to evade the police. And losing your identity is not such a pretty thing. The state apparatus is geared towards universal surveillance of society. The fruits of technology are recycled into maintaining a well oiled state. The spirit of George Orwell`s 1984 oozes out of every page. During the bust on Ruth Rae`s apartment the pols nonchalantly perform their duties. “Parked in one of the slots was a police van, with several pols standing idly around it, weapons held loosely. They looked inert and bored.” One gets the feeling that PKD knew that the paranoia factor within our society, manifold in all its tentacles, would do nothing but increase as we move through time.

A body pert near naturally seeks out data on the life of PKD, a passionate pursuit of proof for his quirky oracles and phantasms of the future, his on-the-mark predictions that echo through the nearly half dozen decades since his typewriter first clattered. The volume Divine Invasions-A Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin is a handy tool for Dickian dogma as well as biographical tidbits that helps to fill in the potholes. An example would be the need of info about Science Fiction publishing and how PKD fits into that bigger picture. Furthermore, it is mandatory that you view the documentary The Gospel According To Philip K. Dick with its funky animation of PKD pecking at his trusty typewriter; oh, so this is what a real writer looks like. Brain storm! Facts about his personal story are friendly bookends to the telltale upshot of his weird novels.

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said would make a stunning movie, visuals out of this world, air-bound quibbles, yellow or orange in color, that look like VW bugs with Mr. Natural decals. The checkpoints would resemble the border bridges of Nuevo Laredo or Ciudad Juarez, but pols in spacesuits inspect IDs-fingerprints, voiceprints, EEG prints appear on the monitor. The wardrobe people will be making whoopee with Alys Buckman, her tight black-belled patent leather pants, gold chains, beaucoup blue eyeliner, black wig long and wavy, witchy fairy boots, and a bag of potions as big as Cleveland. Another good one would be the raid by the pols on Ruth Rae`s snazzy Las Vegas apartment to arrest Jason Taverner; think a low key, intergalactic-like ATF raid on the Branch Davidians in Waco (that`s outer space-like already).

The Epilogue is a new feature in Flow My Tears for PKD as his MO is to usually leave loose-ends pertaining to outcome of his kinetically-charged SF novels. Fully fifty-nine years are telescoped with such flagrant ironies, that prediction of destinies for characters are floating debris in some foamy waves of uncertainty. Those outcomes are hazy mist for your eyes here, but the police state endures and many artifacts are preserved in museums such as pottery and the delicate collection of S & M art of the basket case lesbian twin of Felix Buckman. Dick telescopes aftereffects of the story: a thawing of the police state, liberation of the subterranean student population, new constructs of politically correct, yet impudent and lame universities; seventies déjà vu in the twenty-first century? A mother of all police manuals? Huh?

While reading Flow My Tears, the word parody will rear its homely head. Gulliver`s Travels by Jonathan Swift comes to mind, for when Gulliver arrives in the land of the Lilliputians they are at war with the Blefuscudians. This is a parody of the wars between England and France. PKD spuffs the Nixonian Era where the ‘student movement’ had to be dealt with by undercover agents of Nixon. Recall the fate of the students in this US of 1988. Another comparison is that Swift`s world is first a land of mini-people, then a land of giants-sharp contrasts keep coming up. PKD`s world is similar; one time Jason is famous then the next he is a nobody. In one moment he is in a swinging Las Vegas lounge with a synthetic old flame, then in the next he is under the hot lamp of an pol interrogator, sweating like a possum in a pot destined for the evening vitals. This composition (the pristine manuscript was in tact in 1970) predates the exposure of the Watergate break-in, thus reinforcing a vision of parody of a secret police state before all the facts were revealed.

A significant arsenal of brain cells have been expended (both by myself and other PKD aficionados) by way of theories for the brassy loss of identity of said Mister Taverner. One explanation for his sudden anonymity is that Alys Buckman took the powerful drug KR-3 and she uses a most mysterious mutation of mind control ever fathomed by mortal coil; she, with the craft of a wizard, projects him in a parallel world where he is unknown. Alys is a replicant police agent for her brother/lover (another odd theory of mine). The drug itself dictates how the atoms of reality will be assembled. I don`t know exactly how this works, but I believe that whatever her will is then becomes the prevailing corporeal model, and physical matter rearranges to simulate her mindset. As such, data in info banks vanishes, Heather Hart`s memory of Jason disappears, and Alys can abduct him (as she stealthily does so) to a vestibule as a silly toy to play with; she morphs to a black-burned skeleton, like a puff of smoke (an inside joke for lost comrades), when the poisonous KR-3 fries her system to a crispy critter. My theory here would be that she strains her mind to the outer limits and the KR-3 turns on her and makes her identity-less instead of Jason. The spell is broken-then he returns to his old universe-it goes without saying, though, this is an ify-at best-return to reality.

And then it could be political. Think of the Great Purge of Joseph Stalin. People were erased from the face of the earth. Felix suspects that Jason is getting a green light from higher ups. He`s not at the top of the pyramid and is expendable. Paranoia reigns. How could the file have been purged? Is Jason an agent of the state with a clearance to perform strategic intelligence? Think of Lee Oswald`s waiver to stay in the Soviet Union. Was the parallel world manufactured by Alys political in nature? People that perished in Russia during the Great Purge were whited out completely-photographs, personal records, families too scared, did they ever really exist? Kathy and Jason are afraid of deportment to forced labor camps. Who is really manipulating them? Is the mind control of Alys an early form of ‘identity theft’? Cults do this too. Jim Jones and Charles Manson-need I say more? Devotee are reduced to zombies who kill and worship, kill and worship-zealots with empty promises and brainwashing destroys free will. David Koresh did it too. Die for me! Felix Buckman was the architect of a seamless, efficient state. Taverner was used in conspiracy of Alys to confound her paramour-a spell on socity for reasons unknown.

Dick is commenting on fame too. Is it not an illusion? A Maya-here today, gone tomorrow. This happens all the time. Celebrities crash and burn. Britney Spears, Fatty Arbuckle, Tiny Tim (no, he not fade away). In Sutin`s biography PKD`s philosophy is revealed. Orthogonal time is real time. Linear time is a Maya. The two types of time run parallel to one another. An example would be a vinyl phonograph record. When it is played it is exactly the same every time-same cracks and pops, but your perception alters. Once an event becomes history it is a permanent record. It can be played back over and over again. Once it happens it is permanent through eternity. It is not linear, but rather rotary. It stands still but is time nonetheless. Jason enters a time/warp, a forgotten memory of when he is unknown. This is a valid rotary record, but just has never been played before. Alys taps into the lost memory and makes it a living experience. Have you ever gone to a cut-out-bin and purchased a platter and played it when you got home? Say the Purple People Strings that Ruth Rae so loved? All records are valid evidence of history. Yet some get more playback. Some are never played even once. This was a first for the playback of the anonymous Jason. If no one ever reads what I am writing right now, that doesn`t mean that it`s not part of the collective record of the current chronicle.

Much has been made of the humanity of Felix Buckman when he visits the self-service quibble gas station. Yea, he goes back and hugs the black man after he had given him a sketch of a heart with an arrow through it. I thought this was but a sidebar to a novel about cruelty and paranoia in a totalitarian state. One could see this as parody also. Buckman is giving a token salute to a black man who he has helped to oppress in the past. It was a nice touch, but not really a conversion or anything. He was just feeling sorry for himself, and his twin sister had just ODed in an embarrassing way. A cover up was in place to marginalize the mess up. It is interesting though, that PKD had a similar thing happen to him after he wrote the book. The bit about the John Dowland song is just some gentle ribbing, I thought. “I`ll play it on that big new quad phonograph of mine when I get home.”

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU is the real theme of Flow My Tears. Every page, nearly, oozes fear and confusion. Some funny stuff is on every page too. This is comic relief when butterflies dance in your stomach. But make no mistake, this is Orwellian in nature. Recently I saw on the news that when you show your passport at the border a file will be created by Homeland Security. Eerie chills trickle down my spine. It was implied that HS could use items in your file thereafter. PKD is weeping upstairs as he sees his predictions come true.

Identity loss can result from multiple consequences. It could be the result of disturbing political manipulation. It most certainly will result from mind some form of mind control. Sometimes drugs will play a role, as they did in this case. And best of all identity loss can be a function of quirp in the time/space matrix that sensitive to slight gyrations. The outcome of history can change with any alteration in the sequencing of events. PKD plays with these themes and urges us, vicariously I suppose, to contemplate the tenuousness of our existence. *I do hope my piece is granted a clearance certificate from you readers, then the electronic gates shall open to millions of Science Fiction devotees who have memorized every word of Philip K. Dick.

The best fan page for Philip K. Dick is right here. There is a wealth of information about his life and writings here, and tender loving care is present in abundance. You can find the article “The True Stories of Philip K. Dick” on that web page too. This was a very groovy Rolling Stone piece by Paul Williams that appeared in the November 6, 1975 issue.