Monday, February 21, 2005
Hunter S. Thompson, R.I.P.
America is fucked.
That's all I can think now. Kill Michael Moore, off Ralph Nader, kick the living shit out of Jon Stewart and leave him for dead. You're not even close to the damage that's been done to the American Dream tonight.
Hunter S. Thompson, dead at 67. Shot in the head. Shot himself in the head.
I still remember in the early 1990's when my dad gave me a moth-eaten, falling-apart paperback copy of The Great Shark Hunt. I barely even flipped it. As a 12 year-old talk of decades-old american politics didn't interest me much. I lost it eventually but I never threw it out.
Thompson was never afraid to call a pigfucker a pigfucker. He knew that the realities his generation faced were too ugly, their future too bleak to be talked about directly. Their parents let them down, their government lied to them, their friends were loaded up on planes thousands at a time and told to kill or be killed.
When I found The Great Shark Hunt again in high school I had the same sort of thrill that kids get from finding a porn in the alley beside the convenience store. As I read about him running from Columbian police and drug lords with a head full of coke and acid and a briefcase full of cash, ll I could think was "Who gave me this? My
dad?!?"
Hunter used drugs as a filter. Write the truth of the matter, not what actually happened. Reject the bland repetition of 'objective' history and get right the fuck in there. Rip open the story's chest and tear out its heart with bloodied hands to count the beats before it stops. That's fucking gonzo.
It wasn't until later in the 90's when I finally got around to reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that I really started to understand him. I plowed through The Proud Highway, Fear and Loathing in America, Better than Sex, The Rum Diaries and Kingdom of Fear over a period of about two years. There's still more to read, and I'm not stopping until I've taken in every word.
Twelve hours into my first acid trip. My friend and trip guide was passed out asleep in the livingroom unresponsive, catatonic. The mirror was looking back at me like a kaleidoscope, and my face was slowly turning into a hairy, toothy demon with half a beard and saliva dripping slowly into the sink. I was caught in a downward spiral. I felt god himself turn his back. I was alone, and there was nothing I could do. This was never going to end.
Of all his writings, it was his correspondence that really revealed the depth of Thompson's commitment to his idea of the great american dream--one of the few in recent memory that was actually great. Take it or leave it, there was a savage honor in his absolute commitment to the rugged individualism from which America takes so much of her character.
At the last moment, when I felt the drug taking over, when the tip of the straw I had been using to breathe slowly slipped down under the surface of the stream-now-gushing-river that was my consciousness is when I heard it.
"Jesus god, you pigfucker. Don't you fucking do this. Don't you fucking give up on me, man!"
When I heard about his death, I didn't believe it. Here was the one motherfucker I was sure was too hard to die. This is the guy who brought Hells Angels to Ken Kesey's compound for an acid test. This is the guy who struggled through years of poverty and unemployment, sure of his genius even when no-one else could see it. A man who ran a Freak Power campaign for the sherrif's office in Aspen Colorado. His platform: Rename it Fat City, tear up the streets to plant grass and only arrest drug dealers if they tried to make a profit.
I shook my head and pushed back against the drug. Dragged myself to the computer and started typing, something anything. Just keep the words going. As long as I'm talking to myself I'm talking to someone, and if there's someone in here then he can sure as fuck make it through. Reading his books made me think I knew Hunter S. Thompson, but it wasn't until that minute when I started typing that I really knew him.
His fearless courage in the face of the heaviest shit you can imagine--your best friend with a knife at your throat, fifteen hells angels showing up at your door, adrenochrome boiling your blood--had brought millions of kids safely home from millions of trips. Wherever you were he'd been somewhere worse and he'd fucking made it, so you'd better damn well make it too or he'll come there and gut you like a fish.
The initial surpise is fading, and now I'm just mad as hell. I hope to fucking heaven he had some kind of terminal cancer, because he was too goddamn smart to pull any kind of Kurt Cobain shit. But then, who knows, maybe he was off his head on acid, staring at a dartboard with mugshots of Nixon and Dubya tacked on, hot tears on his face and crying out to the night and whatever gods hadn't been frightened away
by the noise "Goddammit! Goddammit! Haven't these pickfuckers learned ANYTHING?!?"
We'll know soon enough. His body is still warm, and there's no details yet. Hell the poor bastard's still probably got enough amphetamines in him to keep his heart pumping for weeks, even though his soul is long gone.
I made it back from that acid trip safely. And even though I'll never touch the stuff again--I'm glad I did. Because I've taken a single step on the road he walked for forty years, and it was enough to scare the fear of god into me. You never really appreciate firefighters until you've been in a burning house and tried to get out alive.
Hunter Thompson, you were a strange and savage breed. To weird to live and too rare to die.
Good luck with death, old friend, it's the only trip you hadn't taken.
-Trevor
That's all I can think now. Kill Michael Moore, off Ralph Nader, kick the living shit out of Jon Stewart and leave him for dead. You're not even close to the damage that's been done to the American Dream tonight.
Hunter S. Thompson, dead at 67. Shot in the head. Shot himself in the head.
I still remember in the early 1990's when my dad gave me a moth-eaten, falling-apart paperback copy of The Great Shark Hunt. I barely even flipped it. As a 12 year-old talk of decades-old american politics didn't interest me much. I lost it eventually but I never threw it out.
Thompson was never afraid to call a pigfucker a pigfucker. He knew that the realities his generation faced were too ugly, their future too bleak to be talked about directly. Their parents let them down, their government lied to them, their friends were loaded up on planes thousands at a time and told to kill or be killed.
When I found The Great Shark Hunt again in high school I had the same sort of thrill that kids get from finding a porn in the alley beside the convenience store. As I read about him running from Columbian police and drug lords with a head full of coke and acid and a briefcase full of cash, ll I could think was "Who gave me this? My
dad?!?"
Hunter used drugs as a filter. Write the truth of the matter, not what actually happened. Reject the bland repetition of 'objective' history and get right the fuck in there. Rip open the story's chest and tear out its heart with bloodied hands to count the beats before it stops. That's fucking gonzo.
It wasn't until later in the 90's when I finally got around to reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that I really started to understand him. I plowed through The Proud Highway, Fear and Loathing in America, Better than Sex, The Rum Diaries and Kingdom of Fear over a period of about two years. There's still more to read, and I'm not stopping until I've taken in every word.
Twelve hours into my first acid trip. My friend and trip guide was passed out asleep in the livingroom unresponsive, catatonic. The mirror was looking back at me like a kaleidoscope, and my face was slowly turning into a hairy, toothy demon with half a beard and saliva dripping slowly into the sink. I was caught in a downward spiral. I felt god himself turn his back. I was alone, and there was nothing I could do. This was never going to end.
Of all his writings, it was his correspondence that really revealed the depth of Thompson's commitment to his idea of the great american dream--one of the few in recent memory that was actually great. Take it or leave it, there was a savage honor in his absolute commitment to the rugged individualism from which America takes so much of her character.
At the last moment, when I felt the drug taking over, when the tip of the straw I had been using to breathe slowly slipped down under the surface of the stream-now-gushing-river that was my consciousness is when I heard it.
"Jesus god, you pigfucker. Don't you fucking do this. Don't you fucking give up on me, man!"
When I heard about his death, I didn't believe it. Here was the one motherfucker I was sure was too hard to die. This is the guy who brought Hells Angels to Ken Kesey's compound for an acid test. This is the guy who struggled through years of poverty and unemployment, sure of his genius even when no-one else could see it. A man who ran a Freak Power campaign for the sherrif's office in Aspen Colorado. His platform: Rename it Fat City, tear up the streets to plant grass and only arrest drug dealers if they tried to make a profit.
I shook my head and pushed back against the drug. Dragged myself to the computer and started typing, something anything. Just keep the words going. As long as I'm talking to myself I'm talking to someone, and if there's someone in here then he can sure as fuck make it through. Reading his books made me think I knew Hunter S. Thompson, but it wasn't until that minute when I started typing that I really knew him.
His fearless courage in the face of the heaviest shit you can imagine--your best friend with a knife at your throat, fifteen hells angels showing up at your door, adrenochrome boiling your blood--had brought millions of kids safely home from millions of trips. Wherever you were he'd been somewhere worse and he'd fucking made it, so you'd better damn well make it too or he'll come there and gut you like a fish.
The initial surpise is fading, and now I'm just mad as hell. I hope to fucking heaven he had some kind of terminal cancer, because he was too goddamn smart to pull any kind of Kurt Cobain shit. But then, who knows, maybe he was off his head on acid, staring at a dartboard with mugshots of Nixon and Dubya tacked on, hot tears on his face and crying out to the night and whatever gods hadn't been frightened away
by the noise "Goddammit! Goddammit! Haven't these pickfuckers learned ANYTHING?!?"
We'll know soon enough. His body is still warm, and there's no details yet. Hell the poor bastard's still probably got enough amphetamines in him to keep his heart pumping for weeks, even though his soul is long gone.
I made it back from that acid trip safely. And even though I'll never touch the stuff again--I'm glad I did. Because I've taken a single step on the road he walked for forty years, and it was enough to scare the fear of god into me. You never really appreciate firefighters until you've been in a burning house and tried to get out alive.
Hunter Thompson, you were a strange and savage breed. To weird to live and too rare to die.
Good luck with death, old friend, it's the only trip you hadn't taken.
-Trevor
Friday, February 18, 2005
All this interwebbing...
It's fun, but man has my reading week been a waste. My to do list keeps getting shorter, but I'm just crossing off less-essential items.
It's down to my deviant logic analysis and a formal bio lab report.
Soon the lab report's gonna move into the 'optional' column. That's what happens when something's worth 3% of your mark.
Everyone come see Ninja High School. They rule!
-Trevor
It's down to my deviant logic analysis and a formal bio lab report.
Soon the lab report's gonna move into the 'optional' column. That's what happens when something's worth 3% of your mark.
Everyone come see Ninja High School. They rule!
-Trevor
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
I am now officially an internet nerd.
It's true.
I've got a blog, a live journal, a favorite messageboard, a myspace account and any second now I'll probably find myself on friendster. Watch out.
But I'm more connected to people than I ever have been in my life. I've met more people in the last few weeks than at any other time in my life. And they are cooler and more interesting than I could have imagined.
Being nerdy isn't cool, it's just that the coolest people are now doing things that were nerdy a little while ago. Nerdiness is still nerdy, it's just that being a nerd looks a lot more like what being cool used to look like that it does what being berdy used to look like.
That's a subtle, but incredibly important distinction.
There's been some kind of sublimation--the nerds went to technology to get away from people, but they ended up finding the people behind the computers and making friends. Then they got cool, but they didn't leave the computers behind. That's when everything exploded.
The cool people all figured the computers were for nerds, and got left behind. Now they're bigger losers than they could ever have imagined.
E-mail me! Just 'cause I haven't met you yet, doesn't mean we have nothing in common.
-Trevor
I've got a blog, a live journal, a favorite messageboard, a myspace account and any second now I'll probably find myself on friendster. Watch out.
But I'm more connected to people than I ever have been in my life. I've met more people in the last few weeks than at any other time in my life. And they are cooler and more interesting than I could have imagined.
Being nerdy isn't cool, it's just that the coolest people are now doing things that were nerdy a little while ago. Nerdiness is still nerdy, it's just that being a nerd looks a lot more like what being cool used to look like that it does what being berdy used to look like.
That's a subtle, but incredibly important distinction.
There's been some kind of sublimation--the nerds went to technology to get away from people, but they ended up finding the people behind the computers and making friends. Then they got cool, but they didn't leave the computers behind. That's when everything exploded.
The cool people all figured the computers were for nerds, and got left behind. Now they're bigger losers than they could ever have imagined.
E-mail me! Just 'cause I haven't met you yet, doesn't mean we have nothing in common.
-Trevor
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Ruminations from a Mosh
I was in the middle of a mosh pit, today, and I was revelling in the sheer physicality, the kind of raw exhchange of energy that comes when you fall backwards but end up cushioned by a wall of other people having just as good a time as you are.
I couldn't help but wonder if the mosh pit is actually just an outpouring of desire for touch. We live in such a touch-deprived society. As a generation, we were left in front of the TV, and expected just to make it. Babies are bottle fed from the minute they can be, like abandoned goats at the zoo.
We're touch-phobic here, somehow. Sex is vilified and people apologize if they even brush gently in the street. Two men are allowed only the most casual and fleeting of contact--the handshake.
So I'm thinking maybe this mosh pit that I'm in ('cause I was in it while I was thinking this) maybe this is our way of getting back hugs. If we can't touch each other gently then we'll do it as hard as we can.
And it all exploded with Grunge, with that music that spoke so strongly of need. And here we are today.
Hug a mosher! They probably need it!
-Trevor
I couldn't help but wonder if the mosh pit is actually just an outpouring of desire for touch. We live in such a touch-deprived society. As a generation, we were left in front of the TV, and expected just to make it. Babies are bottle fed from the minute they can be, like abandoned goats at the zoo.
We're touch-phobic here, somehow. Sex is vilified and people apologize if they even brush gently in the street. Two men are allowed only the most casual and fleeting of contact--the handshake.
So I'm thinking maybe this mosh pit that I'm in ('cause I was in it while I was thinking this) maybe this is our way of getting back hugs. If we can't touch each other gently then we'll do it as hard as we can.
And it all exploded with Grunge, with that music that spoke so strongly of need. And here we are today.
Hug a mosher! They probably need it!
-Trevor
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Blogger vs. Livejournal
Who will win? Nobody knows!
Right now I am using both. I'm twice as nerdy.
LJ is intersting because it's got communities built right in. The 'friends' feature is amazing because it turns all of the livejournals into message board threads, and everyone's constantly sending messages back and forth.
The past few weeks have been a sort of internet renaissance for me. I just finally figured out message boards. (Although I think they should really be call message boreds, because that's when you post on them)
I'm turning into a bit of a 20Hz addict. It's unfortunate.
Ninja High School might be coming to 403 Adelaide. Prepare yourselves. We might be having a kegger too. There's lots of mights and maybes in the next little while. All good. ALL GOOD!
-Trevor
Right now I am using both. I'm twice as nerdy.
LJ is intersting because it's got communities built right in. The 'friends' feature is amazing because it turns all of the livejournals into message board threads, and everyone's constantly sending messages back and forth.
The past few weeks have been a sort of internet renaissance for me. I just finally figured out message boards. (Although I think they should really be call message boreds, because that's when you post on them)
I'm turning into a bit of a 20Hz addict. It's unfortunate.
Ninja High School might be coming to 403 Adelaide. Prepare yourselves. We might be having a kegger too. There's lots of mights and maybes in the next little while. All good. ALL GOOD!
-Trevor
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
====================================================
!URGENT! - MEMORANDUM - !URGENT!
====================================================
From : Trevor Coleman, C.E.O.
To : All BoringCorp Employees
Subject: Office Party - February 11th @ 403 Adelaide
***ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY!!!***
====================================================
Attention BoringCorp Employees,
I have received an urgent report from the accounting departyment that many departyments fell short of their party quotas last quarter. This is unacceptable.
All employees from the following departyments must attend a party-type gathering immediately or be reassigned permanently to the Departyment of Unpleasant Smells:
PARTY-DEFICIENT DEPARTYMENTS:
=========================+++===
* The Departyment of Awesome
* The Departyment of Panty Throwing
* The Departyment of Ironic Detachment
* The Departyment of Groucho Glasses
* The Departyment of Intoxication and Merriment
If your department is listed above, you should report on February 5th to 403 ADELAIDE ST W. (100m W. of Spadina). Bring adequate intoxicants and supplies to last all night. This is an overtime assignment.
As this is an office function, office-appropriate attire is required. Feel free to wear any uniforms that are a part of your work for BoringCorp and to share your work experiences with other employees.
This kind of unique teambuilding exercise is an example of the excellent community building work that has made BoringCorp one of 'Fortune Magazines Top 6,372 Compaines To Work For'.® I would like to recognize me for being great, and the rest of the company for working for me.
For any questions regarding the office appropriateness of your attire or other party-related business should be directed to me personally at trevor@awesomejumbo.com or 416-859-0921.
Like all of the management here at BoringCorp, I have an open-door policy. That means the door to my voice mail is always open to you.
Well, more like my secretaries' voice mail.
Yeah, I meant secretaries and not secretary. I'm the C.E.O. I need like, tons of secretaries.
See you Saturday,
-Trevor Coleman
Crazy Entertainment Officer
--------------------------------------------------------
BORINGCORP INTERNATIONAL
--------------------------------------------------------
123 Not A Real Company Way
Citysville, Somewhere, A1B 2C3
http://www.clickingthislinkwillgetyounowhere.com
========================================================
!URGENT! - MEMORANDUM - !URGENT!
====================================================
From : Trevor Coleman, C.E.O.
To : All BoringCorp Employees
Subject: Office Party - February 11th @ 403 Adelaide
***ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY!!!***
====================================================
Attention BoringCorp Employees,
I have received an urgent report from the accounting departyment that many departyments fell short of their party quotas last quarter. This is unacceptable.
All employees from the following departyments must attend a party-type gathering immediately or be reassigned permanently to the Departyment of Unpleasant Smells:
PARTY-DEFICIENT DEPARTYMENTS:
=========================+++===
* The Departyment of Awesome
* The Departyment of Panty Throwing
* The Departyment of Ironic Detachment
* The Departyment of Groucho Glasses
* The Departyment of Intoxication and Merriment
If your department is listed above, you should report on February 5th to 403 ADELAIDE ST W. (100m W. of Spadina). Bring adequate intoxicants and supplies to last all night. This is an overtime assignment.
As this is an office function, office-appropriate attire is required. Feel free to wear any uniforms that are a part of your work for BoringCorp and to share your work experiences with other employees.
This kind of unique teambuilding exercise is an example of the excellent community building work that has made BoringCorp one of 'Fortune Magazines Top 6,372 Compaines To Work For'.® I would like to recognize me for being great, and the rest of the company for working for me.
For any questions regarding the office appropriateness of your attire or other party-related business should be directed to me personally at trevor@awesomejumbo.com or 416-859-0921.
Like all of the management here at BoringCorp, I have an open-door policy. That means the door to my voice mail is always open to you.
Well, more like my secretaries' voice mail.
Yeah, I meant secretaries and not secretary. I'm the C.E.O. I need like, tons of secretaries.
See you Saturday,
-Trevor Coleman
Crazy Entertainment Officer
--------------------------------------------------------
BORINGCORP INTERNATIONAL
--------------------------------------------------------
123 Not A Real Company Way
Citysville, Somewhere, A1B 2C3
http://www.clickingthislinkwillgetyounowhere.com
========================================================
(It's okay. You've reached the end of the page. There's still more to read under "This Was Awesome" up near the top of the page.)
Awesome people so far: