Shadowfiend23 @ Wrocław

Last night Tanya took Aaron, Deanna, and me to the Saint Paul Art Crawl. It was a lot of fun! My favorite part was the refurbished cigarette vending machine that was selling $5 works of cigarette-package-sized art, including a little box with a bunny on the front called “Bon Art Petit.” One of the artists had some paintings that reminded me of Aaron’s favorite book when he was younger. When he was about two years old, he used to walk around carrying volume 1 of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. The subtitle and cover illustration are from “The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford.”

This was way before he could read, so I assumed that he just liked the picture. Since it came up in the conversation last night, I decided to read the short story again. It is about a man who discovers the Principle of Sufficient Irritation and invents a machine called the Animator that throws out a heat beam as an irritant. The idea is that annoying irritation is the origin of life. Inanimate objects became alive to escape the source of the irritation. Doc Labyrinth brings the Animator over to show a friend and sells it to the guy for $5 because he thinks it doesn’t work. The new owner puts his wet shoes in the machine to dry them out, and one of them comes alive. The story was originally titled “Left Shoe, My Foot.” The original title would not be nearly as much fun to illustrate.

So whenever you hear someone talking about being annoyed, they’re really telling you how alive they feel. Philip K. Dick would have been proud.