Quote: Philip K. Dick

Charles Freck, becoming progressively more and more depressed by what was happening to everybody he knew, decided finally to off himself. There was no problem, in the circles where he hung out, in putting an end to yourself: you just bought into a large quantity of reds and took them with some cheap wine, late at night, with the phone off the hook so no one would interrupt you...

At the last moment (as end time closed in on him) he changed his mind on a decisive issue and decided to drink the reds down with a connoisseur wine... so he set off on one last drive and bought a bottle of 1971 Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon...

Back home again, he uncorked the wine, let it breathe, drank a few glasses of it... tried to think of something meaningful but could not... and then, with a glass of the Cavernet Sauvignon, gulped down all the reds at once.

After that, the deed being done, he lay back... and waited. However, he had been burned. The capsules were not barbiturates, as represented. They were some kind of kinky psychedelics, of a type he had never dropped before, probably a misture, and new on the market. Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate. Well, he thought philosophically, this is the story of my life. Always ripped off. He had to face the fact - considering how many of the capsules he had swallowed - that he was in for some trip.

The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed looking down at him disapprovingly... "You're going to read me my sins", Charles Freck said. The creature nodded and unsealed the scroll. Freck said, lying helpless on his bed, "and it's going to take a hundred thousand hours." Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from between dimensions said, "...Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end."...

Ten thousand years later they had reached the sixth grade. The year he had discovered masturbation. He shut his eyes, but the could still see the multi-eyed, eight-foot-high being with its endless scroll reading on and on...

Charles Freck thought, at least I got a good wine.

A scanner darkly, 1977