So have you all seen the new issue of Orange Coast magazine yet? You know, “the magazine of Orange County”? Yeah, us neither. But thankfully LA Observed checked it out and hipped us to this decent article about Philip K. Dick’s final years of ducking the spotlight, having profound religious experiences and munching on Trader Joe’s grub down in the OC, basically living a life quite similar — minus the amphetamines he’d mostly left behind — to the goners of A Scanner Darkly. An excerpt:

Dick moved from Fullerton to downtown Santa Ana, where he rented a two-bedroom apartment that he later bought when the building went condo. As a bohemian hipster whose work depicted future people oppressed by life in their monstrously huge, regimented, soulless “conapt” complexes, Dick couldn’t escape the irony that he lived in a condo. In a 1980 Slash magazine interview, he denounced the condo association’s resident meetings as creepily intrusive.

In truth, Dick’s new residence was in some ways ideally suited to him. His building had an elaborate security system, which assuaged his latent paranoia. For the agoraphobic author, the apartment was within walking distance of the post office and a Trader Joe’s, where he could pick up roast beef sandwiches and frozen dinners.

Read the whole of “The Unending Tale of Philip K. Dick” at Orange Coast, or right here after the jump.