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Profane Exegesis: Five Go Mad on Mescalin.

I first came across PKD’s books in the Lochee Library in my

early teens. Perhaps one early evening after tea, glad to get out

of the house to my virtual “home from home”, or just as likelywhen I was truanting/”plunking” from school. My “school

 phobia” had reached a kind of crescendo and I felt I couldn’t

 bear it any more. (Not that I called it that or was even aware of 

or would even agree with the term now; it had yet to be

invented). Or at least it was easier to give into the temptation to

  just not bother to go in. I had already developed my own

interests. There were a lot of books to explore. As many asthere were things to avoid. And thoughts. I can recall the

yellow covers, of I think – having since discovered but

correctly recalling again, the publisher Victor Gollancz. ColinWilson's forst publisher, as I later discovered. Perhaps they

were Penguins. Not the biscuit. One was Do Androids Dream

Of Electric Sheep. The name, Philip K Dick meant nothing to

me, but the fact it was science fiction was interesting, as I’denjoyed some of H G Wells' “scientific romances,” especially

The First Men In The Moon. I would read it in the lunch hour 

at school, in the cloakroom, sitting on the windowsill. Some

scenes were so strangely mystical, numinous, they could have

 been as real as my surroundings.

It was only a matter of time before I twigged it would be a

whole lot better to not bother with school at all for the most part if I could, then I’d have most of the day for myself to read

somewhere, probably the library if no-one challenged me. And

no one did. I was intrigued by the title of the Dick novel,

enough to open it and read a section, but found it too dry and

adult; sophisticated It was obvious it was intended for a

readership beyond my years. I was still reading Alfred

Hitchcock’s boy mysteries and Marvel Comics. I still even

indulged in Enid Blyton’s “Adventure” series and others. The

Rockingdown Mystery, where the children explore a

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dilapidated old mansion, aroused an intense sense of longing

and nostalgia about other's lives. It was why I was reading her 

again, and this novel was the perfect choice.

Dick was clearly more intellectual. Yet I would also read

Psychology Today mags, with a sense of desperation in tryingto understand my own fears and how I might experience a

sense of coping better with the world, and ideally, feeling at

home in it. Ideas didn’t scare me. It was people who were the

 problem. Or so it seemed. Left to myself, I tended to graduate

to whatever interested me. The problem was no one else was

interested in the subjects I was interested in. (As for those who

may have been I had no way of knowing or befriending them.Or so I assumed, because I knew I wouldn't approach them.

 Not at school anyway. By which I also mean girls). Astrology

for example. It seemed obvious enough that some of the booksI looked into on the subject could be uncannily accurate; that

they could bring into focus aspects of myself I was only dimly

aware of or had forgotten.

There was reading Poe, though I barely understood the stories.I think I enjoyed the intellectual struggle of them. It was a

challenge. And he was writing about the most

incomprehensible and serious of subjects; love and loss and

death and redemption. (Surely one of the earliest precursors of 

PKD. Only I didn't get round to reading Dick until my mid-

thirties). His message or focus seemed to be that death and the

loss of love was a recipe for insanity, but that these were thefacts of life. I took this all in on some subliminal level. It

meant little to me as yet at the age of fifteen or so. I was

always a bit slow in seeing wheat was right ion front of my

face. But then, the variables were too complex. And with

reading I could distract myself in the very act of discovering

these themes and ideas, as if they had no personal bearing on

my life and emotions. “Never underestimate the power of 

denial”. ACIM.