We all know the drill: You wake up one morning to discover that one of your favorite short stories by one of your favorite authors is being made in to a movie. You get excited. You deftly try to follow news of the production while dodging actual spoilers. You do the dance of checking up on the director’s track record while questioning the casting. You spend months or years looking forward to it, and you arrange your schedule so you can pick it up during the opening weekend.

And it sucks.

It is somewhat sad that the New Agers have claimed Phil as their own, because I don’t think he’d like them. Though frequently a slave of his own loins, Phil was no fan of easy morality, nor easy spiritual answers, and he loathed fakers as servants of the lie, the black iron prison (to use his term) that enslaves us to the only-apparently real. Though he didn’t believe the truth was the same for every person, he did believe there was an objective truth. He was messianic, believing that the second coming was here, and the new Messiah was already on earth.