Have you been keeping up with Scott Timberg’s excellent multi-part article about Philip K. Dick’s time spent in the most conservative county—that would be the O.C.—in America? From part 3:

Orange County, he wrote, was far to the south of us, an area so reactionary to us that in Berkeley it seemed like a phantom land, made of the mists of dire nightmare Orange County, which no one in Berkeley had ever actually seen, was the fantasy at the other end of the world, Berkeley opposite.

Kidding aside, there were certainly times when suburban SoCal, and life as a married father, didn’t satisfy him. I hadn’t realized before how [expletive] dumb and dull and futile and empty middle-class life is, he wrote in a 1975 letter. I have gone from the gutter (circa 1971) to the plastic container.

Dick’s supposed paranoia didn’t wane during these years: As often happened, the culture and American history caught up with him. Dick was fond of pointing out that the Watergate trials validated his obsession with conspiracy. Tessa, who is hoping to run for Congress as a Libertarian, says that his distrust of the government and fear of the police state increased during his decade in Southern California.

Lethem, editor of Dick’s Library of America volumes, called this a period where he seems less grounded in place. From the evidence of Dick’s work, Lethem said, it’s a time of very strong alienation from any real environment it’s about Disneyland, about condos where you park your car under the building, where you barely get to know your neighbors. It was about Nixon. It’s almost like Dick was a spy in Orange County a mole within the culture.

 
Philip K. Dick, an uneasy spy inside 1970s suburbia (Hero Complex/Los Angeles Times)