Ubik - the antidote to death.

Everything you need comes from a spray can.

In Philip K. Dick's Ubik, one of my favorite Sci-fi novels, everything you need to survive death is in a small aerosol can.  If you have a decent supply of Ubik, when you start feeling run down, or when the world itself starts to run down, you can simply spray some Ubik, and everything is restored - for a time.
In some ways, Ubik seems to be a metaphor for thought.  When our picture of the world becomes faded, if we apply thought to it, if we come at if from a different angle, it becomes refreshed - for a time.
The effect wears off, and so the process has to be repeated.  For some reason, every year after the holidays I feel the need to re-read Ubik.  I just spent a few hours today with my old pal Runciter, and renewed my friendship with the magical spray can.   Why is it that even though I've read the book nearly every year for several decades, it always seems fresh and new to me?  There are always elements of the plot that I've forgotten, bits of character that I don't remember being there before, new dimensions to the puzzle to chew on.  The book hasn't changed.  The book, written during the 1960's is stable.  I recognize the words.  Its the ideas that seem to change from year to year.  Ubik is new each time I read it.