'I wish I could have helped him'

'... I am writing this in the third person to gain much needed objectivity.'  - philip k. dick, valis, p11. 

yesterday horsemouth finished reading the man in the high castle. 

there is in it a great gernsback continuum moment that horsemouth had forgotten or never read correctly or unconsciously supressed (he has a shocking tendency to read things too quickly and without attention and thus miss things). now the gernsback continuum is a william gibson/ bruce sterling(?) short story where, as a result of prolonged exposure 50ies pulp american sci-fi art, a photographer (if memory serves) starts to see it everywhere in real life. he is haunted (the text jokes) by semiotic ghosts. 

in the man in the high castle japan and germany win the second world war and partition america - sitting in the park in san francisco the old japanese bureaucrat contemplates a new american made  piece of jewellery, he gets up from the park bench and into the nightmare world where germany and japan did not win the war. 

this nightmare haunts several of the characters - especially as, when consulted by characters in the book,  the I ching appears to suggest that this is in fact the case and that the characters are living in a weird counterfactual world (thus doubling their bitterness).

it has been a long time since horsemouth consulted the I ching. like the tarot he admires the aesthetics of it. 

the world of valis is similarly divided but having divided himself philip k. dick can play the mental dissolution of his own character for laughs (look at the pay-off line to chapter 1; 'I wish I could have helped him.')

yesterday horsemouth sat out in the back garden and read. sometimes he would go and sit on the front steps of the house and listen to the radio (er. on his work laptop if you see what he means). the broadband signal does not stretch out back (or at least it  didn't used to, maybe it does now with the new laptop).

at some point there will be some painting work to do in the front room.

last night he watched the fall of yugoslavia. sick power crazed individuals march an entire people into the killing fields. the croats are just as guilty as the serbs, they just played it better (the geography favoured them, they were further to the west). the UN, NATO, the EU, the west sits on its hands, arms its favourites and, eventually, bombs. 

next up the fall of kosovo - more insane nationalist carnage.   

today. another beautiful day. horsemouth will go for that long promised walk with enza (more than a quarter of the year has gone since they first hatched the plan).  there is the fall of the house of fitzgerald  to celebrate, there is some politicking they could think about (if they can be bothered), there is catching up to do. 

he has a couple of hours to kill in the morning before he goes - he will dick about online (pardon the pun), get a shower etc.