Tag Archives: Hunter S Thompson

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We Know Time

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It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey. I could see that it was all going to be one big saga of the mist. “Whooee!” yelled Dean. “Here we go!” And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that. We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Hell yeah, they knew time. And we know time. And I know I’ve got nine minutes until I really should start getting these V-Day preparations out of the way.

Yes these days really are passing quite strangely, what with this new way of perceiving them as transient, rather than “every morning a little birth, every night a little death,” which is a quote from somewhere I forget.

It is drizzling and mysterious in my head. One big saga of mist, it has been. But we’re all delighted, and the confusion and nonsense of the night before is behind us, and somewhere far ahead of us in the same sense, and all there is left to do is to move.

Time comes and time goes and everything really is strange and wild. The night comes but it is gone in the morning, only to come back again. It is nothing. It is physics. But anyhow it’s all vanished into so much soreness in the legs.

And so will pass the night ahead of us, since already it is behind us.

Buy the ticket, take the ride. As hideous as it is, I, too, have found it to be true.

To move, to move, to be in motion, that’s what time is, that’s how time goes, and that’s how we avoid time, and though we can never be friends, we can wave as we pass on the street.

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Bike Project Day One

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It’s been a strange morning. Outside the cold is enough to bite your nipples off. The cold is like a son of a bitch bastard with a vengeance. Like Hurley Turley and the Run Around Gang all came down from the sky with a nipple ripping fetish. And what it really gnaws on is your fingers. My fingers, to be more exact, since I’m the one around here with no gloves. Or rather, one glove, and that’s about worse than having none.

We woke later than usual. Or at least I did. I don’t know when GF got up. I got up at 9 and I felt like I had to piss a river. But I also felt tired as shit. But what I didn’t feel was the least bit sick. I guess last night’s nose hi-jinx were just a fluke. Either that or the wine, red meat, Emergen-C, and mysterious pink pill put the virus to bed.

I was having a dream that a blogger made this cartoon about penguins killing a lion with a cannon. The lion was holding a gun up to them and snickering but he didn’t know they had a cannon. Then a million penguins came out of the cannon after they shot him with it and they all chased him down this hole. But then the lion rallied, and he was after all of us, and it wasn’t a cartoon any more.

It was cold as a bitch. Somewhere in the middle of the night I had taken my clothes off. How is it hot in the middle of the night and then cold in the morning? I don’t know.

Then I came out and was hungry but couldn’t think of what to do and it was almost time to walk GF to the metro anyway. The “T” rather.

I put on my thermal long sleeve shirt and about thirteen hats and we went out there, into the blinding white. And it’s supposed to snow more tomorrow. Things weren’t looking good for the start of my biking to work deal.

Coming home I tried to notice a few things that I could write about. All I noticed were that some of the trees had no leaves. And some of them were evergreen coniferous trees or some such, and I remember two leaves blew across the road. And a man nearly killed me when he made a maniacal left turn in front of on-coming traffic.

When I returned home I set to work at once on figuring out this bike situation. I turned the key in the lock. They’ve been sitting outside for months with that lock around them, so I wasn’t the least bit surprised when it didn’t turn all the way. I came inside and got a hammer. I read that this particular lock, “OnGuard,” was notorious for rusting out or some such. I cursed my misfortune. I looked up bikes on  Craigslist. I gave up and read some Hunter Thompson essays.

Then I went out and tried the lock again. Well, I had been using the wrong key. The lock came easily undone when I used the key that said “OnGuard” on it. Son of a bitch.

Then I tried to ride the bike, but the tires were flat as shit, so I still need to go to the shop. And the rear brakes don’t seem to work.

It’s nearly twelve now. So I’ve got about two and a half hours to figure out if I can get this bike working well enough to ride to work. Not exactly what I want to spend my day on, but the days go by so fast anyway, it’ll be Monday before you know it.

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Who the Fuck is Alphonse Karr?

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Well he’s just another French novelist. He happened to say first (in French, originally) that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Ten seconds ago I’d never heard of him, but tripped over his name at the end of this essay call “The Hellfire Club.”

“Maybe Alphonse Karr was wrong,” he says. Just tossing it out there, with no follow up about Karr. In fact it’s the last line of the essay. I don’t know, maybe most people in the 80’s knew the name. But somehow I doubt it. What was he up to here? Just a little throw away for the keepers of arcane knowledge? Or maybe he threw the name in because Karr was writing at the same time period he was talking about (the era of the American Revolution, when apparently the Earl of Sandwich couldn’t be bothered to authorize a new mast for Captain Cook‘s flagship and this led to Cook’s being eaten by angry natives). That would be clever. I guess that’s it. And Karr couldn’t know he was wrong as he wouldn’t be proved so until long after his death, when things really have changed. Or have they? Which does Thompson think?

So much for Empire. These boys liked their orgies and nothing was going to interfere. These were giants. They had standards–not like these whimpering mashers [i.e. Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker] who keep fouling our headlines today.

Maybe Alphonse Karr was wrong.

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What I’ve Learned So Far About Blogging and Life

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Readability Index: Unreadable Due to Length

Alright what I’m going to try to do here is create a unique field theory…I mean a unified field theory of blogging by me. A unified field theory of my life and what blogging means to it. What has writing this blog done to me over the last week and how can I make it useful to my life. How can I enjoy it more fully. How can I do something…how can I feel good about it.

Well, like the first time I started blogging on this mother fucker, I’ve got The National keyed up. Playing “Anyone’s Ghost” over and over again. Great song. I can lose myself in the rhythm of it.

Sometimes I feel like cursing and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I feel nice and sometimes I’m itchy. Someone just called me. I hate phones because they interrupt everything. People are mad at me all the time because I don’t pick up my phone. But I can’t plan for that shit. I don’t know how they made it back in the day with regular phones just ringing all the time and you couldn’t even see who was calling. Screening your calls meant listening to the answering machine.

But that’s all beside the point of course.

I washed the dishes and ate another muffin. I should eat again before I go to work. I was thinking I should enjoy work and stop dreading leaving the house, but that’s just part of me, dreading leaving the house, I can have as much fun as I want when I get out there but the next day I’ll be dreading it all over again. Much like taking a shower.

I still feel like this blog is a kind of fleeting addiction. I have them all the time. Sometimes I’m really into drawing, or basketball, or wine, or…well anything. The one activity I have done throughout my life is writing. So maybe that bodes well for the blog. Because this is a good kind of writing. A kind of writing that motivates me to keep writing. I really like just spitting out my thoughts. And the craziest thing about it is that people read it. It’s there for people to read, like a well dressed pamphlet fluttering down a busy street, but unlike the pamphlet that gets stomped on and waved away and stuck to car bumpers, this blog gets read by people from all over the world. They take time to read the words that came straight out of my head, without any revision or intense labor over them. It’s crazy to me that people like to read that much. Now I like to read that much, but I never thought that so many other people did. It’s the difference between knowing something and feeling it, is something I always say. I know that people are like me, but I don’t feel it.

But along with the addiction idea, is the feeling that perhaps this isn’t healthy. Perhaps I should be going outside and running around, or cleaning the house, or getting a part time job, or toiling away at writing a novel. This is just a part of how I feel about everything except actual paid by the hour work, the feeling that I should be doing something else, that I could be doing something more productive at that moment. The times I snap out of this feeling are usually when I consider that some people don’t have any time or any choice of what they do at any time of the day. A man with no lets can’t decide to cut his toenails, and a starving child can’t decide whether to eat coconut almond muffins or just skip lunch. So that usually gets me focused back on the crazy thing about my life which is that I have the world available to me, as unfair as that may be to other people.

And I use the word crazy too much. It’s kind of a catch all for things I don’t understand or can’t grasp, as well as something I aspire to, like ‘damn that dude is crazy!’

So I don’t want to feel like this is an addiction. Something I think about all the time, that I can’t wait to get back to, that I’m unhappy if I’m not doing it…unless I do want to feel like that. Isaac Asimov felt like that about writing fiction and I’ve always admired him. A lot of people say about writers: “If you can’t not write, then you’re a writer.” I’ve always replied, “well I guess I’m not a writer because I could sleep all day, wake up drink and watch Downton Abbey reruns and I won’t be worried about a damn bit of writing.” Writing is usually something I do because I’m good at it and I like it. Not because I need it. But maybe being addicted to this blog will be like needing to write, which would then put me in the company of great writers, which would then perhaps make me a great writer.

The most wonderful thing about this blog, and I mean wonderful in the truly literal sense as in it creates within my mind a great sense of…wonder…is that I have been able to in some way make at least one person’s life a little more interesting. It’s really weird, actually, to have the effect on someone through writing. I like to think that I make people’s lives better in general when I know them, because I’m hardworking and nice and charming; but it’s super weird to think that my writing has affected someone I don’t know outside of the written word relationship of blogging. Of course I’ve always known that that was what writing is all about, but I didn’t feel it. And when I say feel and know, of course they are happening in the same place, in the mind with the chemicals and neural pathways and all that, I’m really differentiating between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. In theory writing is communication with other minds…but I’ve never before felt the practical application of that knowledge. Just had to make a note for those Ayn Rand types who would laugh at my use of the word “feel.” Ah see, sometimes I worry about impressions for long periods of time without even realizing it. Then again, you can’t say you’re not thinking about the impression you’re making if you’re writing for people to look at it. You’re writing expressly to create an impression, whether in your own mind or someone else’s. What I don’t want to do at least on this blog is to worry that I’m making the wrong impression. Because as I’ve stated before I spend most of m life doing that.

The practical uses of this blog, and by that what I mean to say (or meantersay, as Joe Gargery would say) is the uses of the blog that I would be happy with even if no one ever saw it, are numerous. Being namely that words look pretty on this blog, my thoughts are organized with tags and categories, and even while I’m typing this information is being saved on the internet so that even if my computer should spontaneously combust, I would not lose any of this. So those are good things. Before I started blogging I would write this kind of random bullshit gibberish, but I would save it on a Word document. I would lose all those with my computer. Also with this infinite display of the articles in reverse chronological order, I can more easily reread these posts than I can read all those word documents that are separated and whatnot.

Hm yes but what is the overall idea. What is the purpose? Of course, we all know how I feel about the purpose of life. Since we’re doomed it really doesn’t matter what we do. Except that we can’t. But that’s a load of horseshit.

What then is the difference between bullshit and horseshit?

I do want to create something of value. And I do love writing in this extemporaneous style. Revisions have always been a bitch to me. I have always thought of art as revision, controlling the impression you’re making on people. And that’s well and good. You can’t have a wonderful novel like Freedom without revision. You can’t have an awesome movie like Spartacus without editing. Hm but maybe you can have an incredible novel like On the Road if you practice writing a lot a lot and fill your head jam packed with experiences and information and then sit down at your computer with a gallon of coffee and type for a week straight.

Maybe I will write something in the vein of On the Road, with a Hunter S Thompson slant, with a subject that is truth, that is not fictitious. I will be like Chuck Klosterman, perhaps. The more I blog the more I like that mother fucker and I never once really thought about it before, except right after I got done reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. I’d pretty much forgotten about him until it came up while I was commenting on someone else’s blog and now I find myself quoting him a lot. And what he does is pretty cool. He talks about the world we live in in a funny way. And an insightful way. I bet I could do something like that at least 10 percent as good as him if I really worked at it.

I think my style of writing is pretty engaging. If I were to talk about something people cared about, I think at least some people would find that worthwhile. Hrmph well…shit

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Light Like a Feather, Heavy as Lead

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Readability Index: Unreadable

The readability index is really losing its value as I haven’t written but maybe three posts I would consider readable. I try to mark them readable if I wouldn’t mind reading them on a day when I was only going to read like five blog posts. But I should probably start writing at least one readable blog post for every three unreadables.

But anyway this is the morning. Finally at another morning where I’ve got time before work to do whatever I want. It’s a crazy feeling that I can’t quite grasp. When you can do anything, you might as well do nothing. It’s like that question about eternity. If you knew you were going to live forever, would you do everything you ever wanted to do starting right now, or would you put it off since you’ve got eternity. It’s a funny question because in the scope of eternity both options are exactly the same. Because you always have just as much time to do all the things you wanted to do as when you started. But of course, them that put it off will never do it. I’m pretty much in that category.

Well shit my stats are getting out of control here. That little bar in the left hand corner of the screen is starting to look pretty respectable.

I feel pretty sober right now. Feel pretty dead. But not in the way that I did last night. I’m pretty awake. I went for a walk and it rained. Got soaked. Soaked my jacket and everything so now I’m in the office with the heat up high trying to dry everything before work.

And I’m trying to warm up. Get the fingers going and the mind going right along, but I’m listening to Bob Marley and I’ve got a frown on my face, because I’ve already had to deal with some money issues this morning and that always is a bad start to the day. The thing is I know if I look at my bank account or call some creditors in the morning, I will be down for a while. No getting around it. At the same time, if I don’t call them in the morning, I won’t call them for the rest of the day, so I’ll play the violin and dance around while my financial future burns. Not to imply that it was built as well as Rome. Or even thought about for that matter.

The thrill is gone. That’s a song. But I sort of feel like that right now, though I don’t know why. Blogging has been a revelation. And I have a lot of stuff in my head that I want to get out. But the thrill is gone and it all seems like ash in my mouth. Let me quote from the bible here. Well in a minute. It seems I just had a thought. Maybe it’s because I’m not taking anything in that I can’t put anything out. I have just been pushing content content content and…wait that wasn’t what I meant. I’m just pushing shit out of my mouth…that’s disgusting. I’m just letting this build up of books music and moving pictures out of my fingers onto the page in a surge of random bullshit, and the tsunami that started when I first let loose on the blog has finally subsided. Has finally come to nothing. Subsided is not the right word.

It’s weird I only have two bibles in this room and they are both NIV. King James makes the real shit. Or that’s what I took from Hunter Thompson’s Generationof Swine: Gonzo Papers Vol.2: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s.

I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language—and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity f the madness that governs it and makes it music.

The next essay in that book is one of the best pieces of writing I have ever read. It’s called Saturday Night in the City. I wish I could just reproduce the whole thing here. Or that I had just written it in the first place. Here are the last lines:

“What do you mean” he said. “you made that poor girl get tattooed? Just for a newspaper story?”

“It was the right thing to do,” I said.”We had no choic. We are, after all, professionals.”

Ecclesiastes 3:18-21:

I also thought: As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Man’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath, man has no advantage over the nimal. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place;  all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?

So I saw that there is nothing better for a man than to enjoy his work, because that is his lot. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him?

Funny that the council of what’s it that made the Christian Bible would want to include Ecclesiastes. The Jews were unconcerned with the afterlife, and still are I suppose, though all I know about Judaism I learned in college so what the hell do I know about it. But this book was written by a Jewish man, and for him the fate of a man was the same as a fate of an animal, death. “Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward…?” That’s not something a Christian would say. But of course, that’s the Old Testament. Anyhow, doesn’t matter, because that’s not the biblical quote I was looking for. I was looking for one of the million that say something about such and such turning to ash in someone’s mouth. I’ll find one later. This quote here is a revelation to me. Or that quote there, rather.

Yes all there is for man to do is work, as that is his lot, and so if that is the case, then one might as well enjoy it.

Well, I seem to have broken from the funk of the morning and the finances.

Misty Morning, can’t see no sun

I know you’re out there somewhere, having fun

There is one mystery, I just can’t express

To give your more, to receive your less

That’s old Bob and shit is really starting to look up around here. Sun just cut through the mist outside the window, I broke a thousand words on the warm up, and philosophy is going through my head light like a feather heavy as lead.

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Time Marches On

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I wasn’t thinking of it when I typed the title but now I’m thinking of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Metallica. Awesome song, shit it’s been a long time since I listened to anything by Metallica. I remember taking a survey in school, what’s your favorite band? the popular kid asked me. I was only allowed to listen to Christian Bands, and I knew I couldn’t say any of those, and this was before knowledge of obscure-ass bands was the cold hard currency of coolness. He suggested, Metallica? And of course I said, Hell yeah! And I didn’t hear my first Metallica song for another two years.

But shit, time does march on. I just found a super funny ass blog with a style that I like a lot, from a guy who also like Hunter S Thompson and quoting other people. Shit you can just about find anything in the blogosphere.

I don’t know where my friend Carmen went. Just disappeared all the sudden. Maybe computer problems.

Thanks to the new people liking my shit, I just got ten likes on this bitch! Things are happening around this place. I really don’t even know how. I really don’t. That’s my fucking catchphrase right there, or it might be if I’m not careful, and I’m nothing if not careful. Damn I wish I tried to be funny and succeeded.

Damn. Cup of Tia and UrbanWallArt are some heavy hitters up in this bitch, too. It’s crazy to have someone with mad followers like my blog post. Makes me angry that time is marching on like a mother fucker up in here. It’s already almost nine o’clock and my girlfriend is threatening to make some food when she’s done with this chapter, which means we’ll have to break up this fucking word fest. Ah but I love her. She’s so cray.

God damn a mother fucker just came down the stairs and picked up his delivery order. The shit sounded like they were old friends, too, but I never hear them getting delivery, so that dude just must be mad charismatical.

Well, I don’t have much to say. Just felt like publishing some more shit. Blogging is the craziest shit alive, I really don’t understand it.

Holy shit! My laundry has been sitting in the washer for like two hours straight! Holy fuck! Laundrageddon out this bitch.