"I’m too excited to drive." (Image by Niki Sublime.)

From “An Uneasy Spy Inside 1970s Suburbia,” one of a series of retrospective 2010 articles in the Los Angeles Times about Philip K. Dick, who speeded to his death with the help of amphetamines, but not before decoding our future:

“During his last few years, when he became financially stable for one of the rare times in his life, his daughters visited him at the Santa Ana apartment he moved to after the implosion of his marriage. Dick’s oldest child, daughter Laura, born in 1960, recalls his place full of Bibles, encyclopedias – Dick was a ferocious autodidact – and recordings of Wagner operas.

Phil’s second daughter Isolde, now 42, visited enough during this period to get to know her father for the first time. She recalls him as working hard to be a good father and struggling to overcome his limitations, both with and without success.

During one visit, he got Isa excited about a trip to Disneyland, then open past midnight. ‘He said, ‘We’re gonna go and stay ‘til it closes!’ But in my mind we were there for only 20 or 30 minutes before he said, ‘Honey, my back’s really hurting.’ I think he was just overwhelmed by all the crowds. I knew him, and knew he was uncomfortable moving outside his comfort zone.’

He spent more of his time walking from the apartment to a nearby Trader Joe’s to get sandwiches, a park where he and Isa tried awkwardly to play kickball, and an Episcopalian church where he had running theological discussions with the clergy.

He’d bought himself a Fiat sports car, but almost never drove, telling Isa, ‘Honey, I’m just so excited to see you, I’m too excited to drive.’ She learned quickly to read her father’s code, which seemed designed to protect her from ugly realities.

Sometimes he’d stay up all night, leaving his visitors laughing for hours as he spun idea after idea, or wrote, in a blaze, until dawn. ‘He could go from that really engaging personality to being withdrawn and closed off,’ Isa remembered, explaining that he would sometimes cancel visits at the last minute. ‘I could tell when we spoke on the phone his voice would go really low and flat. When he had that tone he was depressed. He’d say something like he had the flu. ‘The flu’ was usually his code.'”