Whole Dreams
11/7/11
“I sat there for a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction- toward anarchy poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas goat.” –Excerpt from The Rum Diary by Hunter S Thompson
A couple nights ago my eyes opened around 4am after having been catapulted from sleep by a nightmare. As I slept, a masked stranger walked into my room with a gun in each hand and expertly cocked his elbows out and placed one of the barrels on my right rib cage, and the other pointing at my heart in my left armpit. In my dream, by the time I woke I could feel the cold barrels pinning me down on both sides, and only had enough time to think about reaching for my gun on the nightstand. In the few seconds of our paralyzed dance, I thought about how long it would take me to get a bullet in the chamber and if I could get it to this masked man’s temple before he did me in. His lips moved behind the mask and said “Time’s up.” As he squeezed both triggers fluidly and expertly.
I tried to return to sleep several times with a method I have become accustomed to, which is rewriting the dream while I am still conscious. Such as, I replay the scene but envision myself grabbing my gun and saving the day. But each time I tried this method, the gun wouldn’t fire or the man would simply knock it from my hand and continue his business. I was, in essence, helpless. Even in my controlled conscious, I could not facilitate a win over this symbolic enemy. I conceded and let the dream happen, settling in to the warm blood spilling from my chest cavity and onto my satin sheets.
As morning finally came, I got out of bed and drove myself to an interview. I have been searching, and searching, for, a job I guess. For a way out of that dream. Which is more frightening in its ambiguity. Regardless, I woke and went to an interview with Express Employment Professionals. It’s a labor placement company dying to recruit women. They are apparently so eager that Linda met me on a Saturday morning because I kept blowing her off during the week. I will be helping out a local warehouse paper company for the holidays as their shit gets crazy. Linda said during my two hour interview “I would love to just keep talking to you all day. You were a musician, a motorcycle mechanic, have a degree in writing, and live out here all alone. It just seems like I should keep talking to you.” She wanted to go next door for coffee, but I had a date with The Rum Diary.
I drove 30 minutes back south and parked my truck near the bus stop to take me downtown to Cinerama for the 1pm show. I didn’t think twice about going alone. I wasn’t going to wait for anyone. Cinerama is in downtown Seattle and is my favorite theater hands down because it is one of only three theaters in the world that can show original three-strip Cinerama films and it was built in 1963 and saved from demolition by philanthropist Paul G Allen in 1988. The screen has a curtain and the seats are velour, and the ceiling has stars that twinkle on and off randomly. There is no more magical a place to see a movie near me. Plus they have chocolate covered popcorn.
As I settled into the opening scene, it occurred to me that there very well could be an insurgence of Hunter S Thompson fans thanks to the timing of this film. The night before this day, I got lost in YouTube videos of all of the Occupy movements that are happening. Those videos, combined with my own experience having spent a few hours at the Occupy Seattle, gave a clear impression that we lack leadership. In fact this thought occurred to me when a kid in one of the videos said “We lack leadership.” He said this as a guy was being arrested for drawing in chalk on the sidewalk; all around him a flurry of activity ranging from scattered chanting that people jumped on board for, but died off like the wind randomly, and guys with signs running up to be a part of the commotion after hours of sitting in boredom, and smarter looking folk in reading glasses running about saying “where’s our legal team? Why don’t we have a legal team? We should have a legal team.”
The saddest thing about the Occupy movement is the reality that we, in fact, do not have leadership. We do not have musicians or artists or writers that have the capacity to reach all of us. The media had too easy a time to make the people involved in the protests look like idiots. I was there, a lot of them are idiots. But the clear absence of a unified purpose was what truly drove the protests into a hopeful, but not entirely successful venture. The voice was heard, scattered and bipolar as it may have been, America knows it is not alone. We are the 99%, and that was the genius slogan of everything that happened in the last month.
"Freedom, Truth, Honor — you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other." –The Rum Diary
During my few hours at the Occupy Seattle, I felt like I didn’t belong. I felt like an outsider because I have a job and an apartment and provide for myself off of what the rich white men give me for being smart. Not all of us are afforded these luxuries. Not all of us had the opportunity to drink themself into an oblivion but still earn a college degree with magic tricks and major system working. But if it’s only the 1%-- only that small sliver of uber powerful rich assholes that we are protesting--all of us should feel welcome. Even if we have to leave so we can be to work the next morning. Because, hey, if everybody met in Westlake Park, and everybody made a pact that we would not go back to work, and everybody at every Occupy movement made a pact that we would loot for food as a pack…well then at least people would be getting arrested for a reason. I didn’t get the sense from anyone at that movement that they would throw a brick through a window of a Whole Foods with me if we were starving in the street. And even if someone did go to that extreme, it would incite senseless violence all across the cities where common sense was never on the curriculum.
"The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the election results as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms. There had to be a whole new scene, they said, and the only way to do it was to make the big move — either figuratively or literally — from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury, from pragmatism to mysticism, from politics to dope... The thrust is no longer for "change" or "progress" or "revolution," but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been." –From an HST article in rolling stone, 1967
Hunter was right back in the 60s (wasn’t published until 1998) when he wrote in The Rum Diary: the American Dream is merely a "piss puddle of greed spreading throughout the world." There isn’t an American out there who doesn’t know that’s true. If you got the house with the white picket fence, you better look out for that bank and its new finance rate. If you live on the street, you know the world doesn't give a shit about you. Even the people of the Appalachians who have never seen a TV in their life know that Greed is out there; and it is sinister and evil and would likely tongue your face off if you let it in your house. They are happy to stay off the grid. They are smart to stay off the grid.
The American Dream and its neatly packaged pointy lies was a centerpiece for all of Hunter’s works. He grew up in the 40s and 50s when life was squeaky clean and any American could have a shot at 2.5 kids, a Studebaker in the driveway, and a color TV…if they worked hard enough and supported their communities and loved their country enough--good honest work for good honest pay. A nickel for a soda and two straws if you wanted to share it with that pretty blonde in the red cardigan. Hunter and his generation were fed a lie that my generation can’t understand unless we had lived it. We came into the world already aware that things are fucked. He grew up thinking the elbow grease of good men was paving the cobble stone streets for his own family to grow up on. But he was wrong.
And he was pissed about it.
"Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles — a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other — that kept me going." –The Rum Diary
Hunter was 22 when he wrote those words. It was just before, or just at the start of America entering Vietnam. Already the sense of impending doom and crooks around every corner…before Kennedy was shot, before Nixon (Hunter’s biggest nemesis), before Watergate, and long before 9-11 and long before a 1.6 trillion dollar debt and a 10.2% unemployment rate. From 1948 until 2010 the United States' Unemployment Rate averaged 5.70 percent, reaching a historical high of 10.80 percent in November of 1982 and a record low of 2.50 percent in May of 1953. It’s sitting at 9.1% as of now, in case you rarely see the news like me because it disgusts you.
Hey, you know what? I don’t vote. I don’t give a fuck what puppet is talking what jive and I’m certainly not going to spend my time trying to decide which liar I should choose. And I’m not willing to blindly give myself to a party when parties don’t work any better than governments as a whole. My general stance is that everything is fucked, and ground level is the only opportunity I have to connect with humans. Thinking that our votes or our voices make a difference against the powerhouses and goliath-bought-out-corporate-giants who pull every string from every level is a waste of time to me. “If voting made a difference it would be illegal.” I refuse to be overly political and think that I have the ability to get any truth out of what happens in our government. Not from the news, not from underground movies, not from rumors, not from the president, not from my parents. I won’t ever really know what is going on in the government because it is too big to understand and too wrapped in lies and greed and money to approach.
Thinking that we get a fair shake as long as we stay vigilant in guarding against the media’s lies, and dig deep to find the truths about our candidates, is like thinking that every penny you give to Feed the Children feeds the children. I would love to think it does. I would love to get into healthy political debates about issues and policies…if I thought they meant anything. Anything at all. I prefer to practice shooting guns so that when an enemy I can see is in front of me, I will know how to kill them. The enemies who leave my common welfare out of thought when they make decisions that affect all of us, I cannot see. And I cannot reach. And I cannot vote out of office. And I cannot vote a hero into office because none exist. The hero we need didn’t have enough money to finish grad school. And he didn’t pay off three corporations to teach him how to beat the other scumbags. He will never make the ticket. And even if he did, he will never save America from the collision course it has been on for the last 50 years.
"Happy," I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception -- especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence." -The Rum Diary
I don’t pretend that anything I do in this life moves the planet any closer to perfect. I feel no guilt when an activist pleads with me to jump on board. But I do feel like I am not doing a goddam good thing if I am not at the very least using words to illuminate the world that I see. The world that I hear from the people I meet and the people I am honored to talk to. I have moved through having dreams of my own, and I have felt the tinge of pain from having to let those dreams go and get on with the fucking that is life. To get up every day and accept that my insignificant life doesn’t have the chance to stop the path that we are all on; no, not even to make it a little less bumpy. Because life itself is bumpy: there’s death and sickness and heartache that comes from things unrelated to economy and the price of gas. But perhaps we can enjoy the ride. Just the same.
The very next book Hunter wrote after The Rum Diary was Hells Angels. Think about that. At 22 he was disgusted with the greed of powerful white men who had the power to stomp out the truth, and the lack of conscience to do it daily for their own gain. I like to think he went to the outlaws because he had respect for an agency that would never recognize the kind of greed he had seen with America’s upper class. I like to think that, like me, Hunter was drawn naturally to the danger and excitement of the simplistic and caveman-like behavior of the 60s and 70s H.A. And he found a lot of truths in that strange and terrible saga. And it broke his face and scared him at times. But ultimately, Hunter S Thompson never did find any American Dream or untampered truth in this world. No matter how fast he went on his motorcycle, or how many hallucinogens he took, or how off the grid he lived.
“In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely.” –Gonzo Papers, Great Shark Hunt
The bus dropped me back off at Whole Foods where my truck was parked. I went inside to buy a good-for-me-but-gross-tasting root drink. I thought about how nice it is to eat things from Whole Foods because they are natural and good for you and the way the farmer intended it. Then I thought about why I never shop there and looked around at the upper class folks and scenester rich kids around me. And I realized how much of a fad it is to eat healthy. And how something being a fad makes the opposite of the fad an accepted norm. And how gross processed foods are and how bought out the companies who produce them are. And then I had enough of thinking and drove home to try to start my motorcycle.
"Sometimes at dusk, when you were trying to relax and not think about the general stagnation, the Garbage God would gather a handful of those choked-off morning hopes and dangle them somewhere just out of reach; they would hang in the breeze and make a sound like delicate glass bells, reminding you of something you never quite got hold of, and never would." –The Rum Diary
I’ll leave you with more of my favorite Hunter excerpts:
The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.
Oscar Wilde once said, "Nowadays, people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.
There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get...
But with the throttle screwed on, there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are the wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it... howling through a turn to the right, then to the left, and down the long hill to Pacifica... letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge... The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others- the living- are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.
11/7/11
“I sat there for a long time, and thought about a lot of things. Foremost among them was the suspicion that my strange and ungovernable instincts might do me in before I had a chance to get rich. No matter how much I wanted those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction- toward anarchy poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas goat.” –Excerpt from The Rum Diary by Hunter S Thompson
A couple nights ago my eyes opened around 4am after having been catapulted from sleep by a nightmare. As I slept, a masked stranger walked into my room with a gun in each hand and expertly cocked his elbows out and placed one of the barrels on my right rib cage, and the other pointing at my heart in my left armpit. In my dream, by the time I woke I could feel the cold barrels pinning me down on both sides, and only had enough time to think about reaching for my gun on the nightstand. In the few seconds of our paralyzed dance, I thought about how long it would take me to get a bullet in the chamber and if I could get it to this masked man’s temple before he did me in. His lips moved behind the mask and said “Time’s up.” As he squeezed both triggers fluidly and expertly.
I tried to return to sleep several times with a method I have become accustomed to, which is rewriting the dream while I am still conscious. Such as, I replay the scene but envision myself grabbing my gun and saving the day. But each time I tried this method, the gun wouldn’t fire or the man would simply knock it from my hand and continue his business. I was, in essence, helpless. Even in my controlled conscious, I could not facilitate a win over this symbolic enemy. I conceded and let the dream happen, settling in to the warm blood spilling from my chest cavity and onto my satin sheets.
As morning finally came, I got out of bed and drove myself to an interview. I have been searching, and searching, for, a job I guess. For a way out of that dream. Which is more frightening in its ambiguity. Regardless, I woke and went to an interview with Express Employment Professionals. It’s a labor placement company dying to recruit women. They are apparently so eager that Linda met me on a Saturday morning because I kept blowing her off during the week. I will be helping out a local warehouse paper company for the holidays as their shit gets crazy. Linda said during my two hour interview “I would love to just keep talking to you all day. You were a musician, a motorcycle mechanic, have a degree in writing, and live out here all alone. It just seems like I should keep talking to you.” She wanted to go next door for coffee, but I had a date with The Rum Diary.
I drove 30 minutes back south and parked my truck near the bus stop to take me downtown to Cinerama for the 1pm show. I didn’t think twice about going alone. I wasn’t going to wait for anyone. Cinerama is in downtown Seattle and is my favorite theater hands down because it is one of only three theaters in the world that can show original three-strip Cinerama films and it was built in 1963 and saved from demolition by philanthropist Paul G Allen in 1988. The screen has a curtain and the seats are velour, and the ceiling has stars that twinkle on and off randomly. There is no more magical a place to see a movie near me. Plus they have chocolate covered popcorn.
As I settled into the opening scene, it occurred to me that there very well could be an insurgence of Hunter S Thompson fans thanks to the timing of this film. The night before this day, I got lost in YouTube videos of all of the Occupy movements that are happening. Those videos, combined with my own experience having spent a few hours at the Occupy Seattle, gave a clear impression that we lack leadership. In fact this thought occurred to me when a kid in one of the videos said “We lack leadership.” He said this as a guy was being arrested for drawing in chalk on the sidewalk; all around him a flurry of activity ranging from scattered chanting that people jumped on board for, but died off like the wind randomly, and guys with signs running up to be a part of the commotion after hours of sitting in boredom, and smarter looking folk in reading glasses running about saying “where’s our legal team? Why don’t we have a legal team? We should have a legal team.”
The saddest thing about the Occupy movement is the reality that we, in fact, do not have leadership. We do not have musicians or artists or writers that have the capacity to reach all of us. The media had too easy a time to make the people involved in the protests look like idiots. I was there, a lot of them are idiots. But the clear absence of a unified purpose was what truly drove the protests into a hopeful, but not entirely successful venture. The voice was heard, scattered and bipolar as it may have been, America knows it is not alone. We are the 99%, and that was the genius slogan of everything that happened in the last month.
"Freedom, Truth, Honor — you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other." –The Rum Diary
During my few hours at the Occupy Seattle, I felt like I didn’t belong. I felt like an outsider because I have a job and an apartment and provide for myself off of what the rich white men give me for being smart. Not all of us are afforded these luxuries. Not all of us had the opportunity to drink themself into an oblivion but still earn a college degree with magic tricks and major system working. But if it’s only the 1%-- only that small sliver of uber powerful rich assholes that we are protesting--all of us should feel welcome. Even if we have to leave so we can be to work the next morning. Because, hey, if everybody met in Westlake Park, and everybody made a pact that we would not go back to work, and everybody at every Occupy movement made a pact that we would loot for food as a pack…well then at least people would be getting arrested for a reason. I didn’t get the sense from anyone at that movement that they would throw a brick through a window of a Whole Foods with me if we were starving in the street. And even if someone did go to that extreme, it would incite senseless violence all across the cities where common sense was never on the curriculum.
"The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the election results as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms. There had to be a whole new scene, they said, and the only way to do it was to make the big move — either figuratively or literally — from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury, from pragmatism to mysticism, from politics to dope... The thrust is no longer for "change" or "progress" or "revolution," but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been." –From an HST article in rolling stone, 1967
Hunter was right back in the 60s (wasn’t published until 1998) when he wrote in The Rum Diary: the American Dream is merely a "piss puddle of greed spreading throughout the world." There isn’t an American out there who doesn’t know that’s true. If you got the house with the white picket fence, you better look out for that bank and its new finance rate. If you live on the street, you know the world doesn't give a shit about you. Even the people of the Appalachians who have never seen a TV in their life know that Greed is out there; and it is sinister and evil and would likely tongue your face off if you let it in your house. They are happy to stay off the grid. They are smart to stay off the grid.
The American Dream and its neatly packaged pointy lies was a centerpiece for all of Hunter’s works. He grew up in the 40s and 50s when life was squeaky clean and any American could have a shot at 2.5 kids, a Studebaker in the driveway, and a color TV…if they worked hard enough and supported their communities and loved their country enough--good honest work for good honest pay. A nickel for a soda and two straws if you wanted to share it with that pretty blonde in the red cardigan. Hunter and his generation were fed a lie that my generation can’t understand unless we had lived it. We came into the world already aware that things are fucked. He grew up thinking the elbow grease of good men was paving the cobble stone streets for his own family to grow up on. But he was wrong.
And he was pissed about it.
"Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles — a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other — that kept me going." –The Rum Diary
Hunter was 22 when he wrote those words. It was just before, or just at the start of America entering Vietnam. Already the sense of impending doom and crooks around every corner…before Kennedy was shot, before Nixon (Hunter’s biggest nemesis), before Watergate, and long before 9-11 and long before a 1.6 trillion dollar debt and a 10.2% unemployment rate. From 1948 until 2010 the United States' Unemployment Rate averaged 5.70 percent, reaching a historical high of 10.80 percent in November of 1982 and a record low of 2.50 percent in May of 1953. It’s sitting at 9.1% as of now, in case you rarely see the news like me because it disgusts you.
Hey, you know what? I don’t vote. I don’t give a fuck what puppet is talking what jive and I’m certainly not going to spend my time trying to decide which liar I should choose. And I’m not willing to blindly give myself to a party when parties don’t work any better than governments as a whole. My general stance is that everything is fucked, and ground level is the only opportunity I have to connect with humans. Thinking that our votes or our voices make a difference against the powerhouses and goliath-bought-out-corporate-giants who pull every string from every level is a waste of time to me. “If voting made a difference it would be illegal.” I refuse to be overly political and think that I have the ability to get any truth out of what happens in our government. Not from the news, not from underground movies, not from rumors, not from the president, not from my parents. I won’t ever really know what is going on in the government because it is too big to understand and too wrapped in lies and greed and money to approach.
Thinking that we get a fair shake as long as we stay vigilant in guarding against the media’s lies, and dig deep to find the truths about our candidates, is like thinking that every penny you give to Feed the Children feeds the children. I would love to think it does. I would love to get into healthy political debates about issues and policies…if I thought they meant anything. Anything at all. I prefer to practice shooting guns so that when an enemy I can see is in front of me, I will know how to kill them. The enemies who leave my common welfare out of thought when they make decisions that affect all of us, I cannot see. And I cannot reach. And I cannot vote out of office. And I cannot vote a hero into office because none exist. The hero we need didn’t have enough money to finish grad school. And he didn’t pay off three corporations to teach him how to beat the other scumbags. He will never make the ticket. And even if he did, he will never save America from the collision course it has been on for the last 50 years.
"Happy," I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception -- especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence." -The Rum Diary
I don’t pretend that anything I do in this life moves the planet any closer to perfect. I feel no guilt when an activist pleads with me to jump on board. But I do feel like I am not doing a goddam good thing if I am not at the very least using words to illuminate the world that I see. The world that I hear from the people I meet and the people I am honored to talk to. I have moved through having dreams of my own, and I have felt the tinge of pain from having to let those dreams go and get on with the fucking that is life. To get up every day and accept that my insignificant life doesn’t have the chance to stop the path that we are all on; no, not even to make it a little less bumpy. Because life itself is bumpy: there’s death and sickness and heartache that comes from things unrelated to economy and the price of gas. But perhaps we can enjoy the ride. Just the same.
The very next book Hunter wrote after The Rum Diary was Hells Angels. Think about that. At 22 he was disgusted with the greed of powerful white men who had the power to stomp out the truth, and the lack of conscience to do it daily for their own gain. I like to think he went to the outlaws because he had respect for an agency that would never recognize the kind of greed he had seen with America’s upper class. I like to think that, like me, Hunter was drawn naturally to the danger and excitement of the simplistic and caveman-like behavior of the 60s and 70s H.A. And he found a lot of truths in that strange and terrible saga. And it broke his face and scared him at times. But ultimately, Hunter S Thompson never did find any American Dream or untampered truth in this world. No matter how fast he went on his motorcycle, or how many hallucinogens he took, or how off the grid he lived.
“In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely.” –Gonzo Papers, Great Shark Hunt
The bus dropped me back off at Whole Foods where my truck was parked. I went inside to buy a good-for-me-but-gross-tasting root drink. I thought about how nice it is to eat things from Whole Foods because they are natural and good for you and the way the farmer intended it. Then I thought about why I never shop there and looked around at the upper class folks and scenester rich kids around me. And I realized how much of a fad it is to eat healthy. And how something being a fad makes the opposite of the fad an accepted norm. And how gross processed foods are and how bought out the companies who produce them are. And then I had enough of thinking and drove home to try to start my motorcycle.
"Sometimes at dusk, when you were trying to relax and not think about the general stagnation, the Garbage God would gather a handful of those choked-off morning hopes and dangle them somewhere just out of reach; they would hang in the breeze and make a sound like delicate glass bells, reminding you of something you never quite got hold of, and never would." –The Rum Diary
I’ll leave you with more of my favorite Hunter excerpts:
The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.
Oscar Wilde once said, "Nowadays, people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.
There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get...
But with the throttle screwed on, there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are the wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it... howling through a turn to the right, then to the left, and down the long hill to Pacifica... letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge... The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others- the living- are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.
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