The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one—in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that—as it that weren’t enough—but you, like Fat, ponder forever over those fluctuations in an effort to order them into coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes it s place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.

It was a mainstay of Kevin’s bag of verbal tricks that the universe consisted of misery and hostility and would get you in the end. He looked at the universe the way most people regard an unpaid bill; eventually they would force payment.

I am reading ‘VALIS,’ and I’ll be god darned if it ain’t The Real Stuff.

As my friend McCune once said, seconds before he pressed play on ‘Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome’ (yeeeaaahhh!!!): “We live in a world where ‘War & Peace’ exists, and people read those Harry Potter books instead.”