Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Metro suburbs of Boston lies a small, unregarded little town. One of the former residents of this town was an utterly insignificant little pale-skinned nerd, who, as our story opens, was so amazingly primitive that he still thought Hypercolor t-shirts and fanny packs were a pretty neat idea. This child has – or, rather, had – a problem, which was this: most of the people he knew seemed to be setting up weird and arbitrary systems that didn’t make any sense and only served to complicate matters. He’d spent the last few years at an elementary school designed around the “open classroom” theory. The idea was, a town would build a very large classroom. They would then section that classroom off into five segments: four “class areas”, and one big meeting place in the middle. Having done all that, the final step would be to drop roughly 120 screaming children, and four teachers, into the large, arena-like space, shut the doors, close the windows, turn up the radiator, and sit back, confident in the knowledge that you’ve revolutionized public education by eliminating outdated, nonsensical concepts like “a controlled environment” and “learning.” It was 1990. The earthling’s name was Andy Hicks. He is a ten-year old ape descendant with undiagnosed predominantly inattentive attention deficit disorder (ADHD/PI) and co-morbid rejection sensitive dysphoria, and a book is about to drive a bypass through his soul. This is not his story. I mean, it kind of is. But mostly, it’s the story of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. If Hitchhikers’ Guide feels like something that was made up as the author went along, that’s because it was. Thing is, it works. The first reason it works is that the disjointed nature of the narrative underscores the main theme of the books, which is – essentially – the story of man’s search for meaning in a universe where petty bureaucracies, bloody-minded machine-logic, and decisions made with no thought about how those decisions might affect others aren’t just human failings, they’re universal failings. The local government decided that Arthur’s house would be knocked down to build a bypass, and failed to properly communicate that fact with him, or anyone else. Then the Vogons show up, and blow up the Earth for the exact same reason. The story is so familiar by this point that we kind of forget how brilliant that is. The second reason, is because “making things up as he went along,” was pretty much Douglas Adams’s superpower. See, the first episode of the Hitchhiker’s Guide radio show was actually supposed to be the first episode of an anthology series called The Ends Of The Earth. Next week, you were supposed to hear a completely different take on how the planet could conceivably blow up, and so on. But then, Douglas remembered being 19 years old, lying drunk in a field while hitchhiking through Europe. He’d been reading a book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Europe, and – as he stared up at the night sky – thought it would be cool if someone wrote a similar book about the galaxy. Having decided that his alien-invasion-via-incompetent-bureaucracy story needed a character who knew what was going to happen before anyone else, he then thought “hey, this guy – let’s call him Ford Prefect - should be a field researcher for… The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy!” (For maximum effect, please read those last two paragraphs while listening to “Journey Of The Sorcerer” by The Eagles.) The whole story is held together by Adams’ extremely strong comedic point of view, which keeps us tethered even as he gleefully bounces from idea to idea. The Earth is demolished. Vogons torture you by forcing you to listen to awful poetry. Our heroes then get rescued by a spaceship that’s, appropriately enough, powered entirely by randomness. There’s a mythical world that – as legend tells it – got extremely rich by building planets. And – oh, wait for it – it turns out that the Earth was, in fact, a giant supercomputer! See, millions of years ago, a couple of philosophers had wanted to know the true meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and they built a big computer called Deep Thought to crunch the numbers, and the answer it finally spit out, after millions of years of calculating was – all together now – 42. The computer announced that the problem was they hadn’t actually agreed on what the question was, so they decided to design another computer to figure that one out, and – lo and behold – it was the Earth. And then, mere hours before the Earth figured out what the question was, the Vogons went and blew it up. It’s the only time - in the original story, at least – where there’s any kind of obvious setup and payoff, but it’s a big one. The reason nothing makes sense on Earth, is because Earth was created specifically so that someone else could figure out why nothing made sense anywhere else. You could read this to mean that the world we live on – the rules we make for ourselves, the ways we communicate, and the ways we fail to communicate – are a distilled microcosm of the ineffably chaotic nature of the universe itself. Anyway, back to Fifth grade. Zoom in on weird little Andy, doing long division and utterly failing to carry the two and winding up with a remainder that’s way more complicated than it should be. Cut to: his teacher, joking in front of the class that his “answers were on steroids,” which was funny the first two or three times, maybe. Cut to: the other kids in class, picking up on the fact that “even the teacher makes fun of Andy,” and – despite the fact that, last week, they were picking on him for being too smart – are now picking on him because his math is weird. In fact, there are a lot of things about Andy that are “weird.” He drops Star Trek references in class, and Star Trek is weird. He sings pop songs in the hallway on his way to the bathroom. He’s hyperactive and gets into trouble because he isn’t careful, but he’s also kind of a goody-goody and doesn’t like being rough and violent like boys are supposed to be. He reads. For fun. His parents don’t even have cable. They lead the music at church, and some of the kids go to the same church and they see his parents up there leading music at church, and that’s weird. And what’s really weird, is that sometimes, when they make fun of him for all the little weird things he does like talking about Star Trek and singing and just being weird, he gets really mad and spazzes out on whoever’s nearby. Like, at random. Andy – for his part - doesn’t know why he has to go to this school, and why it’s somehow his fault for “bringing it on himself” instead of their fault for punching him and tripping him and calling him names. If there are rules governing this world, he doesn’t know what they are. They seem really arbitrary. For instance, back in second grade, some other kids hog-tied him and his best friend to each other at recess. Supposedly, it was all part of a game. Then the bell rang, and everyone ran in, leaving them there. When they finally got untied, they ran straight to the main office… and got in trouble for coming in from recess late. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is – allegedly - way too advanced for a ten year old. And yet, for me, it made all the sense in the world. Douglas Adams was tall. Really, really tall. You won’t believe just how mind-bogglingly tall Douglas Adams was. He was so tall, in fact, that on school trips, when most teachers would say “meet under the fountain” or “meet under that tree,” his teachers told their classes to “meet under Adams.” One day, he was playing rugby, and his ungainly awkward knee came in contact with his ungainly awkward nose, permanently damaging his cartilage and making it impossible for him to breathe through his nose for the rest of his life. He missed deadlines. Possibly his most famous quote that isn’t actually in one of his books is “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” He constantly delivered books late, or had to be locked in hotel rooms with his computer until they were finished. In fact, the reason that the first Hitchhiker’s book only adapted the first four episodes of the original six-episode radio series, was that the book had been delayed so long that the publisher apparently just sent someone to Douglas’ house to collect the manuscript in whatever form it was in. That’s why it sort of just… ends, with a perfunctory one-page chapter where Zaphod announces that they’re heading to “the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.” And yet, people loved collaborating with the guy, regardless of how frustrating it was, because he was constantly churning out ideas. He saw connections between things that no one else saw. He thought about what might be possible with computers, and how they might affect publishing and the flow of information, and – voila – there’s the titular Hitchhiker’s Guide – a portable information terminal that connects to a vast network of articles, images, and sounds. In 1979, it must have seemed like an artifact from the distant future. In 2017, you have one in your pocket. He was a genius at figuring out how people might relate to technology, and also a genius at pinpointing the specific ways technology wasn’t living up to its promise – whether he was directing his satirical rage at a Nutrimatic drink dispenser that couldn’t figure out how to make tea, or at any personal computer not manufactured by Apple. I’m not saying that Douglas Adams had ADHD/PI, because I’m not a medical professional and, even if I were, it is unbecoming to diagnose the dead. Having said that, he had all the symptoms. It takes one to know one. The Encyclopedia Galactica has this to say on the subject of People With ADHD: “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects certain carbon based life forms, believed to be caused by functional impairments in the brain’s neurotransmitter systems, particularly involving dopamine and norepinephrine receptors.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy also mentions ADHD. To paraphrase: Sometimes, we’re Arthur Dent, and the world doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, we can’t ever seem to get a foothold, the rules keep changing, and we’re still in our pajamas. Everyone thinks we’re dumb and useless, and we can stumble into manipulative situations without realizing it. At our best, though, we’re persistent. We ask the questions no one else is asking, even if people think we’re dumb. “Is there any tea on this spaceship?” Or “Why can’t we use the infinite improbability drive to destroy the missiles?” Or, if we’re talking specifically about Douglas Adams… well, dust off that old copy of The Salmon Of Doubt and flip to the essays he wrote for MacUser and The Independent in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and you’ll see him asking things like “why can’t we access high speed internet on mobile devices?” and “so, why can’t I start a document on my desktop computer, and then have it instantly show up on my laptop?” That last one was from 1989. The guy predicted Google Docs in 1989. He wasn’t a soothsayer or a wizard – he was just a guy who’d lost a few good chapters when the electricity went out, and frequently forgot to save his work. They say necessity is the mother of invention, but sometimes necessity is the unholy love child of failure and distraction. Every now and then, we’re Zaphod Beeblebrox, but only when we’ve somehow divorced ourselves of our self-awareness. Most of the time we hate people like Zaphod because nothing bothers us more than someone who’s dumb, happy, and cocky. Here we are, trying really, really hard not to be dumb – pushing ourselves to perfection, second guessing everything we do – and meanwhile this guy swoops in, turns towards the attractive person we’re flirting with, and says “Hey, doll, why don’t you come and talk to me? I’m from a different planet.” I mean, seriously. The guy gets away with stealing a spaceship and I can’t even do long division properly. Sometimes we’re Trillian, who got so bored with the dreary life of academia that she ran off with a two-headed alien she met at a party. Folks like us tend to make hasty decisions, crave novelty, and sometimes wind up in unhealthy situations as a result – no matter how “devastatingly intelligent” we are. Her characterization in Adams’ final Hitchhikers book, Mostly Harmless, is even more poignant: that’s where we meet an alternate universe version of Trillian who didn’t leave with Zaphod, and who became a TV news reporter instead. She’s still got the double degrees in math and astrophysics, though, and parallel universe/”what if?” themes crop up throughout. I could write a whole separate essay about how this manifests itself in the various “official versions” of Hitchhiker’s Guide, and how they all diverge from each other and contradict themselves so heavily that there’s no such thing as a proper continuity. Suffice it to say, Douglas Adams never let “established canon” get in the way of pushing his characters into radically new situations every time the story hopped from one medium to another. He built himself a world where he could always go back and take a different path. And sometimes, at our worst, we’re Marvin the Paranoid Android. Because we’re taking in so much information, all the time, and don’t have the ability to process it all, we focus on what feels important. And, sometimes, the sense of self-protection we’ve built for ourselves against the onslaught of data totally backfires, and the only thoughts and feelings we can process are the negative ones. Psychiatrists call this “rejection sensitive dysphoria.” Because we’re never quite sure when we’re letting people down until it’s too late – and we’re always letting people down, it seems – folks with ADHD occasionally have a tendency to over-correct, and just assume that everyone wants us to go stick our heads in a bucket of water. Sometimes, however, we’re Ford Prefect. And these are the times when we’re in our element, we’ve sussed out the situation, we know where the good parties are, and we really know where our towel is. See, an ADHD/PI-type spends most of their life alternating between a dreamy, lazy state, and a panicked, “where the hell are my keys?” state. And while this is not a particularly tenable position to constantly find oneself in, one does manage to exercise both the “creative problem-solving” and “dealing with crisis” parts of ones brain quite often. That means, if there’s something you happen to be good at, you’re really good at it. If there’s a particular social setting you feel comfortable in, you’ll make a lot of friends and be really, really cool. You might be an alien, but your perspective doesn’t necessarily alienate you. You might notice things no one else notices. You might be able to slide effortlessly into any number of settings, and go off on great adventures, and know about all the neat stuff the normal people don’t know about. If you can disguise yourself as “one of them” for just long enough to get by, you’ll do all right. Heck, you’ll do better than all right. Because – at the end of the day, at the end of the universe even - it’s all about knowing where your towel is. March 8, 1978. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy premieres on BBC 2. Almost no one listened to that first episode, apparently. The show became a hit through word of mouth. And one of the things that really struck people, once they actually heard it, was how different it sounded. See, radio drama never really died in England, though most radio comedies back then still sounded like they had thirty years previous. You know: live studio audience, live foley effects with coconuts clopping for horses, and so on. Hitchhiker’s – on the other hand – was produced more like a rock album. There’s explosions, computer blips, synthesized ambient hums, ring modulated alien voices, wisps of atmospheric music… all kinds of things radio drama listeners are used to hearing now, but – believe you me – Hitchhiker’s did it first. It’s classic fish-out-of-water comedy by way of Pink Floyd. It’s an idea that’s simultaneously out-of-left-field, and yet completely obvious once you think about it. One of our local Boston stations happened to air it in the winter of 1991. I was eleven years old. I can still remember sitting in the front seat of my father’s old van, driving through a winter storm, while the opening music plunked away under Peter Jones’ comforting narration. The way the headlights illuminated the snowflakes in the darkness as we drove onwards through the night, I swore I was flying through hyperspace. And in a way, I was – escaping from the mean kids at school, the forgotten homework assignments that seemed to mean so much at the time, the fear that I’d never belong. Traveling light years ahead, into a future full of darkness and light. I was a year away from my first starring role in a play, and two years away from my first serious depressive episode. In four, I’d start writing my own songs. Five years, my first sound design. Six years, I’d make the wrong college choice on a whim and feel completely alienated – and then, eventually, completely accepted, all over again, and I wouldn’t quite understand any of it. Ten years and four months later, I’d be writing a parody of the opening song for “Cabaret” for our college theater departments’ end of year roast and awards banquet, in my girlfriend’s dorm room, when I’d learn that Douglas Adams – the author who told me, whether he realized it or not, that it was okay to be weird - had died suddenly at a gym in California. It’s a genuine tragedy that the guy who predicted the iPhone didn’t even live long enough to own an iPod. Sometimes, the Vogons blow up your planet before you even know what the question is. In twelve years, I’d get my first professional job in radio. In nineteen years, I’d be working for a different station – the very same station, in fact, where I had heard the first episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy on that starry, snowy night in 1991. There will be long periods of confusion, anger, elation, uncertainty, and the inability to get a nice cup of really hot tea. I will run off with people who claim to be from a different planet. The world will end, several times. And I’m still here. And – every now and then – I almost feel like I know where my towel is.