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February 26, 2005

"No point in mentioning these bats, I thought. Poor bastard will see them soon enough..."

Just a few short minutes ago, I crawled off of my bed to turn off the lights and call it a night. Now I’m sitting at my computer again, lashing myself to the keyboard like that poor schmoe who ties himself to the wheel of the cargo ship in Dracula.

What, exactly, is wrong with me? Geez…

I started working on my screenplay for class right at this time last night (or yesterday morning, if you prefer), and I managed to crank out almost nine pages before I dove headfirst into my pillow at 6 a.m. Of course, I had to get up for work two hours later, so I’m not going to expect similar screenwriting results of myself tonight.

I just ate an Eggo—over the sink, as to not dirty a plate and hasten my descent into the category of subhuman. Sure, they’re prone to dripping their syrupy goodness into my sink like the slavering maw of something from the H.R. Giger sketchbook, but they taste no different for the lack of plate, knife or fork.

* * * * *

I’ve been meaning to put something up about Hunter S. Thompson’s recent suicide at age 67. I’m trying to withhold judgment until more information has been released, as my knee-jerk reaction to what I’ve read/heard as of now—that he shot himself while his family was in the house, and while he was on the phone with his wife, no less—isn’t sitting too well with me. It’s one thing for one of the great American iconoclasts of the 20th century to go out in the manner of his choosing. It’s another thing entirely for said iconoclast to subject his family to undue suffering. I mean, he did shoot himself in the head, after all.

So much for withholding judgment. But, hey...he wouldn't have wanted me to. An essay without judgment is like journalism without gonzo.

My first exposure to HST’s writing was back when I was 16 or 17, during the run of “Mr. Roberts” with the Riverside Community Players. One of actors in his mid-20s loaned his copy of Hell’s Angels to me, which I promptly devoured and never gave back. Years later, I let one of my Notre Dame seniors borrow it, with similar results. I was a bit bummed to not get it back, but karma is karma—and it’s one of those books I don’t begrudge having to replace if losing my original meant that it had a chance to crowbar its way into somebody’s consciousness.

I went on, over the subsequent years, to read HST’s The Rum Diary, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a bunch of his political pieces as have been anthologized in various collections, his famous “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” (which you owe it to yourself to read if you’ve never had the pleasure) and half of his three-volume collection known as The Fear and Loathing Letters. The first volume, in particular, really resonated with me; I read those letters at the same age at which he had written them, and I found myself nodding at his restless, almost frantic realization that he was calibrated for a far different world than that into which he’d been flung. Later on, you learn to carve out an oasis for yourself however you can, but in your early 20s? To have it dawn upon you that the vast majority of the people around you just don’t think the way you do is absolutely paralyzing.

If it hadn’t been for authors like HST and people like Jon in my life, I think my early 20s would have been an especially nasty stretch of bat country, so to speak.

Posted by patrick at February 26, 2005 03:30 AM

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Posted by: Jon Bastian at February 26, 2005 08:48 PM

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