Annotations - Absolute Beginners Part 3 : Let's Go

No major references for the most part. Let's Go is a translation of the Indian word "Hokahe" which crops up later.
I don't know how well it comes over, but I wanted to evoke a changed reality for most of this piece, hence the change in prose style and tense, from past (he did) to present (he does). I also loosened the mind a little bit and threw in some stream of consciousness business which I then tried to make sense of in the following paragraphs. It's meant to suggest a concertina effect to time - The fight takes place over eight hours, but all takes place in the time it takes Blue to fall down and stand up again.
Eyes as dead as John Wayne's... Just goes nicely with the later cancer cowboy. The original line was Eyes as dead as John Waye's left lung, but I've just checked and it was stomach cancer that got the Duke, so that's changed.
Believe it or not, Zzyzx is NOT another sigil word - It's a real place in the Mojave desert, keeping us in the same place as the Manson/Bradys reference in part 2. There was a natural mineral spring spa at Zzyzx (pronounced zeye-zacs) which the owner never had permission for as it's all federal property. He was eventually arrested for using the land and also for allegedly breaking drug and food laws (whatever they might be) and the land was confiscated in that foul year of our lord 1974. I think that might be where the training camp from part 1 now stands...
"If he moves, kill him" obviously, paraphrasing the great line from William Holden's Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch (Which I think I even mentioned at one point as a subtitle for part 3?). A Pike-monster now appears to take down the Nagual in standard action movie style, smothering him inside and out with tumours birthed from Blue's throat (and yet everyone in this episode seems to be smoking constantly - Will they never learn?).
Before we reach the end and our big guest appearance, there's one more thing to point out, another interloper who has snuck in from someplace very different:
"Bishop..."
Pike smiled.
Read together, that's Bishop Pike smiled. No big deal, but I like it as Bishop James Pike was a good friend of PKD and the basis for Timothy Archer in The Transmigration Of... Transmigration, of course, is the idea of the soul or psyche's movement from one body to another, whether through reincarnation or possession of a pre-existing body. Could that also appear here at some point? Hmmm...
And finally, ladies and gentlemen, a drum roll please for our latest star: Midge! If Fliss is Felicity and Ari is Arihaily, could Midge really be anything other than our old friend Imogen Dangerfield?

Annotations - The Word Is...

...Love, according to the Beatles track. Basically placing Sarah little more than three months on from last time we saw her. Again, not vital to an understanding of the story, but hopefully, the burgeoning counter culture will tie in with the development of our little Sarah as she loses her dad and joins a succession of less than helpful cults and churches. I guess she's my way of squeezing some theological and spiritual concerns into DW, on top of the already existing ideas.
I wanted to try and draw some correlation between Sarah and her father, so that when we finally get into the possible familial links with Fliss, there's an existing lineage of slightly odd spiritual/magical/revolutionary figures stretching out behind her. I now see her as the final manifestation of the line, the perfect distillation of all that went before, meaning that she didn't enter DW so much as bring it into being here on Earth (or in the realm next door at least).

Running late... that's a private joke, because this was once again supposed to be Sarah meeting George King and the Aetherians (who are now called Arthur Pendleton and The Order Of Intergalactic Angels. They WILL turn up eventually. But not tonight.)
No specific reference, but I like the idea of Sarah being particularly susceptible to the shamanistic power of music, the drum beat of The Word helping her to reach a transcendent state. That's why she drifts so much into her own thoughts both here and in Another Girl. Felicity's mum lives right on the border betwen our world and hers.
Lamplight on the bridge... The corpus callosum is the link between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and a malfunction of that link is often characterized by visual halucinations, particularly random flashes of colour and light, like PKDs pink laser beam. Just to completely contradict everything in that last paragraph, we could play up this aspect and have it seem that Sarah is experiencing halucinations and hemispheric cross-chatter due to a mental imbalance, which would just make Fliss a third generation schizophrenic thrown into full-blown episodes by the ingestion of the DW substance. Maybe.
Everything from Deep in thought... to ....the higher realms is a fairly straight description of Astral projection techniques AND the standard hypnagogic/sleep paralysis state. This is when the body goes into lockdown to prevent sleepers from thrashing too wildly in their dreams. In some cases it can occur before you're asleep, leading to a wide variety of folklore and strangeness. PKD claims that most of his VALIS visions occurred in this state. The Mara is a German witch creature which is said to sit upon the chest of a sleeper and bring nightmares. Again, this reinforces Sarah's Tuetonic roots and ties in with the sleep paralysis.
A silver star - Notes deleted.
The red forest, the zone of alienation - These are the names given to the area directly surrounding and a dead wood adjacent to Chernobyl. Sarah is seeing the future here. We might make it back to Chernobyl at some point in the near future.
An earnest young man - Notes deleted.