Dennis said the house belonged to someone called Tommy the painter, the guy I saw with Phil who, as we know from The Total Dickhead, faked his own death.

I can’t remember if I snorted any of the meth that Buffalo Bill was crushing up with a black 8 Ball on a mirror. I do remember that it was a long, strange drive back home to my yuppie enclave of Los Gatos, as I had a Hells Angel biker tailing me about ten feet behind my car. Maybe he was one of Buffalo Bill’s protectors, seeing if I was a narc—although at the time I thought he was PKD himself.

Anyway I wrote up a post on your cool essay “Haunted By Phil Dick” on my PKD blog The Total Dick-Head.

Re his viewpoint switching trick, I noticed Bernard Cornwell doing it quite a lot in his Sharpe novels, and they strike me as mere sloppiness. There’s no reason for it other than that Cornwell suddenly wants to tell you what another character in the scene is thinking, so he just pokes into their viewpoint for a paragraph or a page. He’s writing the books so quickly that it would probably just slow him down to find another way to do it while maintaining Sharpe’s perspective…it’s shorthand. It doesn’t bother me much, really, but I do notice it. When Dick does it, it’s a totally different thing…part of his narrative quirkiness…and adds to the sense that all viewpoints are really essentially one…we’re all perceptual conduits peering at each other from different parts of the same oneness…so characters looking at each other are a function of the godhood coming to self-awareness. I think Dick is doing this sometimes.