h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

14 May, 2001

At 6:02am today, while lying in bed listening to Doc's newscast on KROQ, I was stunned to hear that Douglas Adams had died last Friday. When I got to work, I checked out the h2g2 website and read all of the news stories that they'd linked to. But I still had to put my own 2 cents in, so when I came home this evening, I posted the following message in one of the tribute forums at h2g2. Here it is, verbatim:

This seems like as good a place as any to relate my DNA epiphany story. We all sound like 12-steppers who became addicted to a GOOD thing...

Sometime in 1981 (probably the summer between junior high and high school for me), my mother told me about a funny television show she'd seen on the PBS channel here in Los Angeles. She said that I would really like it, but I was doubtful, because it had the stupidest name I'd ever heard: "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

As often happens with PBS, the show was scheduled at a time when no 13 year-old boy with sober parents could possibly watch it, so I never caught an episode. But my older sister found out that there was a companion book, and purchased it. She, too, recommended it, and so couple of days later I borrowed her copy.

It was as if some British guy I didn't even know had said, "Hey, Kid! Yeah, YOU, the short one with the longish hair -- I wrote this book for you!" The book was MINE, and not because it was science-fiction and I was the target audience, but because this was the kind of humor at which I'd been waiting my whole life to laugh.

Of course, I quickly scooped up "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", and later "Life, the Universe, and Everything" when it finally was published [my first hardcover!]. A few years after that, my mother came back from a trip to England with a box-set of the whole radio series on cassette, and just so I could follow along more easily, "The Original 'Hitchhiker' Radio Scripts" was published in 1986, complete with a grammatical error in Geoffrey Perkins' prologue. Perkins' and DNA's footnotes in that volume made me laugh as hard as anything in the actual show, no small feat.

As you can see, I suffer from what Stephen King has called "literary elephantitis", so I'll try to wrap this up. I never did see all of the episodes of that oddly-named TV series. But I still have that first copy of "Hitchhiker's" that my sister bought almost exactly 20 years ago. I also have all of the other DNA books I bought subsequently, including my single favorite book of all time, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency".

I still have them because they are timeless, a vital, beating heart (yech) of all-important humor. Those books explained the Universe to me, by explaining that there is no explanation to the Universe. How neat is that?

Almost, but not quite, exactly neat enough. I'll miss you, Mr Adams.