Erin asked me to, for chissake, post something already, and since this is a nice rainy Portland Saturday, what with the diffused light coming in at no particular angle through the living room window, and what with me sipping coffee on the orange sofa beneath it, I figured "what the hell."

Currently reading: How to Survive a Robot Uprising, Psychotic Reactions and Carburator Dung, Design Writing Research, and Another Fine Myth/Myth Conceptions.

Currently waiting for: The bull. The man. The 5-0. The Po-Po. Erin found some dame's purse in the street, traced it back to an abandoned house. A dead end. Now she's at work and I'm waiting on the man to come pick up the pieces. Duck soup.

Currently loving: Brick. Erin and I can't get enough of teenagers talking like Dashell Hammet writes. After seeing the movie twice in the same weekend we now amuse ourselves by reading the reviews and bashing those that we don't agree with. If you think film is a dish best served noir, you'd be doing yourself a mitzpha by checking this one out.

Currently beat: KotOR. Yeah. I kicked Malek's ass up and down both sides of hurt street. He won't be trying to rule the galaxy again anytime soon.

Currently Playing: Right field. Kickball. Our team's last score: 10-1. I'll let you guess who lost. I kicked the ball once and I also caught the ball once.

And now for some random notes on A Scanner Darkly which I just finished. I was gonna post these a while ago, but work's been frickin' crazy. Anyways:

Just finished A Scanner Darkly, a book dealing with a drug-addict's paranoiac fantasy world of conspiracy and surveillance, which it turns out reflects the world the drug addict actually lives in, which in some ways reflects our own. It's good shit.

The idea of being infinitely surveilled, the culture of watching, is standard post-modern stuff, but it connects with me. We like to watch. Puritans believed that only a chosen few were destined for heaven, but that everyone should act as those few might, in case they themselves were among them, but also because their neighbors were watching to see if they were not. And from them to us. We watch ourselves on TV as we watch ourselves being watched by cameras.

In the book Bob Arctor is a narc, watching some drug-dealing friends, some of whom, it turns out, are watching him. Later, the principle character's identity is split by abuse of a drug called "Substance D" (mors ontologica) and he, as "Fred", watches himself as Bob Arctor. Fred who is also being watched by his superiors, and who later burns himself out abusing "Death" as Substance D is called, and is used as "Bruce" to observe a conspiracy within the rehabilitation centers. Endlessly surveilled without power. Without active power?

And Dick himself says he is the book. So we, in a sense, watch him as we read. And the characters are based on his friends. So we watch them as well. Infinitely observing, but as quantum theory tells us, each observation also changes the experiment. As Dick puts it, looking into a mirror is looking at an image of ourselves pulled through infinity. So Bob becomes Fred becomes Bruce becomes...

Ourselves pulled through infinity. Ourselves viewed by God? Through God's eye? Maybe it's too easy to go there, but at any rate, the book allows you to ask these kinds of questions, which is a rare find.

Thank you PKD.

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Next post: Erin's CRAZY sci-fi book group (it's why I'm reading Robert *sigh* Asprin).