I always elected to ship out

In a sense, the better you adapt to school the less your chances are of later adapting to the actual world. So I figure, the worse you adapt to school, the better you will be able to handle reality when you finally manage to get loose at last from school, if that ever happens. But I guess I have what in the military they call a 'poor attitude,' which means 'shape up or ship out.' I always elected to ship out.

It reads good until you find out the author was Philip K. Dick in a letter to his daughter, Laura, in 1974. It'd be hard to find someone who achieved so much and failed to adapt both to school and then to 'reality' after it in such a spectacular fashion. With 'reality' in quotes, of course, since this is PKD.

Amazon just delivered the second volume of the Library of America's PKD set, and the quote is from an appendix. They're handsome volumes, the highest quality books - in terms of paper, binding and so on - in this house. Volume two is 1,100 pages in slightly over an inch, with all the amphetamine logic you'll ever need.

A good site, regularly updated, for all that's old and new in the worlds of PKD: totaldickhead.blogspot.com