The great thing about the library was that nothing too fucked up could happen there.

Untold multitudes of librarians and patrons would disagree with me, but I'm only speaking for myself. Even when I went to the library with my father, things were relatively chill between us, and would remain that way until we left. It was a building decorated in every shade of brown the '70s had on offer.

We walked to the back of the library, past the magazine racks, to the reference materials and the study tables. All sorts of people sat back here, but the ones I noticed the most were the crazy people, because I was with one. The library was wonderful because it was calm and full of books and this peace could be anyone's for no price at all. If you're crazy at a certain level, chances are, you don't have an office to be crazy in. The library is a decent replacement — an office of crazy, where you can work on projects no one cares about or understands, sitting at a heavy wooden table next to lamps and metal carts and encyclopedias. And my father worked very hard.

"Come back fast," he said. "You have to help me."

He sat, and I escaped like I was spring-loaded and shot at the science fiction section. I brought some books back and sat down with him. I hated to look at him writing his crazy-ass letters. He wrote with such care, his letters so pristinely serifed they looked Old German, and everything he wrote was straight garbage at best, something that would put him in jail at worst. I hated it so much, and it got sadder the more I thought about it until I thought I would start scream-crying at the office of crazy. So I went elsewhere. I read about anywhere but here. I read about space shit. No one wants to be that predictable and psychologically obvious, but sometimes things are exactly the way you expect them to be.

Once in a while, my dad would interrupt me. "How do you spell 'legislation'?" he'd say. "How do you spell 'inheritance'?" Questions like that, words like that. Sometimes he had me copyedit the whole thing, fixing spellings and sentence structures for letters in which he politely requested the return of $3 million from the governor, or a helicopter to Seoul. And I would go from crazy-ass letter to book to letter, book, letter, book.

The world my dad lived in was the one in which dark forces thwarted him at every turn, keeping his fortune just out of his reach and turning his family against him. He knew it was a false world, and none of the letters he wrote to the president or the rants he subjected us to were able to bring back the true world. At the library, he would write his letters and I would read Philip K. Dick and, each of us, in our own way, would hate this world.

Today is Philip K. Dick's birthday. Even if you don't care about science fiction, you know about him. There's the Philip K. Dick who belongs to everyone: American science fiction writer, known for drugs, paranoia, ontological fuckery, and the occasional really awful sentence. A heap of screen adaptations, most of which are glossily plastinated trash. At this point, dude is even recognizable as an adjective: You can throw Dickian on the heap with Dickensian, Orwellian, and, like, no women.

There's also the Philip K. Dick who is mine. The one I've been reading for half of my life. The one who wormed his way into my life before I could be thoughtful and critical about the things I loved. The one who reigns in my personal pantheon.