“The User Illusion” talks about the existence of both the consciousness and the unconsciousness within us.  It reminds me of “Blink”.  The author uses a lot of dichotomies: I and Me, within and without… it’s actually not as pleasant a read, and in fact gets repetitive and irritating after a while, but it’s definitely enligtening in some ways.  The thesis of the book is really that we take in a lot more information from around us than we’re aware of; much of it seeps in through our unconsciousness and affects us in the way we think and act.  And in turn many of our actions are carried out without a lot of conscious thought put into it.  It’s one big unconscious cycle, and life is more fun this way.

So it’s a lot like “Blink”.  But more wordy.  And by the end of the book I’ve lost sight of how the first hundred pages connect with the main thesis, even though the author keeps referring to the individuals mentioned in those first hundred pages.  I call a flow-of-argument-fail with regards to this.

I basically always have the attention span of a gnat but the heat makes it even worse.  After 10 minutes of watching a movie I’d switch to reading, then as soon as an email comes in I’d read that, then go back to the book for another page before deciding I wanted to go back to the movie again, which after 5 minutes of viewing I’d decide I should reply to that email, and so on so forth.  So after migrating to the basement for a couple hours I finally managed to finish reading “A Scanner Darkly”.  I watched the movie a couple years ago and never quite understood it, although I found the animation technique and visuals to be quite amazing.  Reading the book did indeed make the story much clearer, though there was actually less to the story than I expected.  Perhaps I always expect a lot to be there whenever I don’t understand something.  There was more to the ending than I’d realized, which I got only after I read it up.  Incidentally I have no recollection of how the film ended at all.  It’s like I’m one of the characters.

The author says there is no moral to the story; that’s really just his way of saying the story is much more than your average story.  It is like, life.  But of course there is a moral, and it’s that, in the words of Mr. Mackey, “Drugs are bad, m’kay”.  Duly noted, but the more intriguing aspects of the story are really how reality becomes distorted and questionable for the protagonist, and how there is still a glimmer of shimmery hope for him even though it seems he’s faced with a tragic demise.  All is not lost.  Possibly.

On that note, it’s time to get back to “Schindler’s List”.