A Scanner, Dark-AF
I gave a girl I have a crush on my own worn-in copy of A Scanner Darkly. It’s a book that has helped me survive countless nights of hardship.
A month or so later the cops raided her vape shop.
I want to be clear that I am not a narc.
Well, I fucking hope I’m not, because – if I am – then I am the victim of a sophisticated brainwashing operation that I don’t think even Pete Hegseth could pull off.
That was supposed to be funny.
I find myself at the age of thirty-three, still playing court jester for my own psyche’s introjects.
Anyway, I want to be clear that Philip K. Dick was not a manual.
I want to be clear that when I handed her that paperback – my copy, the one with the cracked spine and the general physical evidence of a person using literature as a fucking life raft – I was doing the thing humans do when they want another human to understand something about them without having to say it out loud for fear of abuse.
It’s not the humans’ fault, and most certainly not the girl’s.
It’s Mark and Cynthia Urben’s fault.
Just kidding.
Kind of.
Anyway…
The book was a love letter written by a dead prophet that I was subletting for romantic purposes.
This seemed reasonable at the time.
Being constantly on some kind of legal analog for drugs my physiology has grown accustomed to also seemed reasonable.
That is neither here nor there, and I find the insinuations you are making right now, dear reader, offensive, and I have forwarded your thoughts and feelings to the Pentagon.
Again, anyway…
She has warm eyes and a way of trying not to laugh at me that is, in my completely unbiased and LLM-approved assessment, a weapon of mass destruction, and it concerns me that the U.N. Inspector General Guy hasn’t investigated this.
She laughs at my mishaps with a kind of fond exasperation that makes me feel simultaneously seen and gently roasted, which is, if you know anything about me, the precise frequency at which I am most helplessly myself.
She also has a kid, and an ex, and apparently a whole situation with the guy who owns the shop, which I found out from a stoner who used to work there and delivered this information with the casual cruelty of someone who does not understand that they are destroying a man and the subject of their gossip with their childish prattling.
Enjoy the marines, by the way, stoner dude.
Great time to enlist.
*Salutes*.
Unfortunately, now the cops have raided her shop.
And somewhere there is a copy of a book about a man so deep undercover he forgot which side he was on, given to her by a guy who was just trying to say:
hey, I think you might be the kind of person who would understand this.
PKD wrote about the imperial apparatus as an inescapable, reality-distorting force that grinds the vulnerable under its heel while the comfortable look away.
He did not write about it as a cockblock.
And yet:
I am, I have come to understand, a man who experiences reality at a slight metaphysical offset from everyone else, rotated slightly on an axis that makes perfect sense from inside and looks, from outside, like a guy who gives girls A Scanner Darkly and then becomes a person of interest by ambient association.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, applied to my romantic life, states that I can know either where I stand with someone OR how fast I’m moving toward them, but never both simultaneously.
The mere act of observation collapses the wave function.
The act of giving the book introduced a controlled substance investigation into the variable set.
I contain multitudes, and apparently the multitudes have one thing in common: they do not want me getting laid.
She was visibly sad today.
The shop feels half-empty now.
The raid took most of what made it feel like itself. She was sitting behind the counter looking like someone who has been managing a situation for a long time and is tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.
I wanted to say something useful.
I attempted to say something that could be interpreted as human-adjacent.
We had a conversation about LLMs and the irony is not lost on me. I tried signaling that I also have no clue what the fuck is going on right now, and then something in my chest did the thing it does.
You know the thing?
Not horny, hungry, or angry – you know, the basic male emotional range…
The philosophy thing.
The thing Sophia does when she knows that she can put you through whatever hell she wants and that all she has to do is present a willing pair of boobies at some vague point in the future [(Heisenberg + Jung – remember that for later, me -Me)] and you’ll forgive her eventually.
I went home and talked to an AI about ontological mathematics and the structural impossibility of love and whether the Architect’s core problem was that he couldn’t get laid.
This is my life.
It is, against considerable odds, still going, despite my best attempts.
I was wondering while taking a shit and batting away my cat, Scoop:
Philip K. Dick spent his whole career trying to answer the question: what is real? If real itself is a concept up for review by the majority, then…
[(Matrix 4 something something, probably -Me)]
I wrote an article months ago that probably already has the solution for whatever I’m upset about right now.
But I’m not digging for it.
ADHD something something…
Instead, I’d much rather roast CEOs gently from the back of the class.
Or the slaughterhouse.
Take your pick on which perspective you choose to take each day.
I think about this a lot, standing in a vape shop that just got raided, watching a girl trying not to vent her frustration at me in a situation that will almost certainly never become anything, in a world that is increasingly difficult to distinguish from a novel Dick wrote while running on amphetamines in a rented room in 1973.
What is real?
The cracked spine of the book and the yellowing pages, I hope.
-BU
Gnosis Under Fire 