A pin with a pink triangle fell out of my pocket the other day. I was taking my keys out of my jacket and it fell onto the pavement below. I picked it up and inspected it and wondered where it had come from.

The pink triangle was originally a badge affixed to homosexual prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. Later it was adopted it by the gay community and, hey presto, they turned a bad symbol into a good symbol.

Of course this is where I’m headed now: In ‘VALIS,’ a girl delivering pain medication to Philip K. Dick’s schizophrenic alter ego, Horselover Fat, is wearing a necklace containing a pink prism. Fat opens the door, sunlight hits the necklace, and a beam of pink light hits Fat in the forehead. Immediately his brain is filled with whole libraries’ worth of knowledge that he could not possibly have known before. He can read and write new languages, has limited telepathic powers, and so on. He believes the light is God, or at least some sort of alien entity (God is an alien entity, when you really think about it), who is communicating things to him. And perhaps not necessarily on purpose. He admits there is nothing extraordinary about him. He just saw something that maybe he wasn’t supposed to see.

When I picked the pin up, I held it in my hand and looked at it. I took it inside and tossed it onto my desk . . . tossed it onto the only thing that was on my desk, which was a copy of ‘VALIS’!!

Later, I took a picture. I left it on top of the book because it looked nice:

The rest of the book looks like this:

Pink light!! I’ve been reading a book about pink light and how it paved the way for enlightenment and total insanity.

What’s going on???

I guess I’m at a point in my life where, rather than considering the most straightforward, obvious explanation (reckon the kids call that “occam’s razor”)—which is that someone slipped it in my pocket while I was working at the coffee shop, or whatever—I am fully prepared to believe that an unseen cosmic deity is whispering hints about the true nature of existence into my poor broken brain.

Hey, OK! Bring it on, God.

Is a pink triangle pin the Portland equivalent of a beam of pink light? That’s great. I mean, hell, if that’s true, you’ve really got to step back and appreciate that for what it is.