It is 04:00 and the typewriter is mocking me.  It sits there, a dull gray beast of burden, demanding tribute in the form of coherence, which is a commodity currently in short supply in this suburban bunker.  My head feels like it’s being compressed by the gravitational pull of a collapsing star, likely the result of a misguided attempt to mix a shitload of Ny-Quil with high-grade existential dread.  But we must press on, mustn’t we, dear reader?  We must push through the mire of our own synaptic failures because today – December 16th – is a holy day.  A day of reckoning.  A day when the cosmos, in a fit of absolute, unadulterated irony, decided to birth Arthur C. Clarke, the British Baron of the Space Elevator, and Philip K Dick, the Paranoia King of Point Reyes, onto the same spinning rock.

To understand the sheer statistical absurdity of this coincidence requires a level of mental gymnastics that usually results in a pulled groin muscle of the soul.  On one hand, you have Arthur C. Clarke.  The man who looked at the sky and saw geometry.  He was the sort of guy who could sit in a bungalow in Sri Lanka, sipping tea that probably cost more than my car, and calmly calculate the trajectory of humanity’s ascent into pure energy.  Clarke gave us the monolith.  The clean, black slab of infinite possibility.  He gave us a computer that murdered astronauts with the polite detachment of a DMV employee denying your license renewal.  His prose was like a freshly polished chrome fender reflecting a binary sunset – clean, scientific, and optimistic in a way that makes you want to check your wallet to see if you’ve been robbed.  He made us believe that if we just did the math right, we could all turn into giant space babies and float around the cosmos listening to Strauss.

And then. Then.  You have the other one.

If Arthur C. Clarke was the cleanroom of the future, Philip K. Dick was the grimy alleyway behind the simulation.  Dick didn’t look up at the stars; he looked at his neighbor’s window and wondered if the man inside was a robot sent by the government to steal his neuroses.  He was a creature of amphetamines and pink lasers, a man who wrote about the fluidity of reality because his own reality was melting like a Dali clock left on a dashboard in the Mojave.

He didn’t give us starships; he gave us empathy boxes and spray cans of reality-restorer.  He asked the question that haunts me every time I try to assemble IKEA furniture: Is any of this actually real, or am I just a brain in a jar hallucinating a particleboard bookshelf?

It is fundamentally unfair that one day gets to claim them both.  It’s like scheduling a chess match between Arthur C. Clarke – the supercomputer – and Philip K. Dick – the feral raccoon that just at a bag of espresso beans.  Clarke offers you a vision of technology as salvation; Dick offers you a vision of technology as a trap laid by a gnostic demon.  One is the Apollo program; the other is a bad trip in an Orange County strip mall.

So here I sit, surrounded by empty Ny-Quil bottles and half-finished manuscripts, trying to reconcile these two visions.  An I a Star Child, waiting to shed this fleshy husk?  Or am I just a replicant with a four-year lifespan and a cough syrup problem?

The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the static between the channels.  We need to cold, hard vacuum of Arthur  C. Clarke’s logic to keep us from dissolving into puddles of god, but we need the frantic, sweat-soaked panic of Philip K. Dick to remind us that the systems we build are just as broken as the people who build them.

I raise a plastic shotcup containing a green fluid of suspicious viscosity, to Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick.  To the Sentinel and the Scanner.  To the man who saw God in the machine, and the man who saw the Devil in the wiring.

Cheers.

N.P.: “No Feelings” – Sex Pistols