Buy the Ticket; Take the Ride

I've been in a bit of a Hunter S. Thompson mood lately. Re-reading a couple of his books, watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on dvd. I was given The Kitchen Diaries, a sort-of memoir/series of stories about Hunter told by two of his close friends, and that's most likely what kicked this off. He's one of my favorite writers, and was one of my few living heroes (until he offed himself, of course. Then he wasn't living. [for completion's sake, the others are Grant Morrison, Eddie Izzard, and David Foster Wallace.])

Anyway, I've been writing, though nothing's finished. As such, I have little to post, though I feel I should say SOMEthing. Thusly, here is an excerpt from HST's book Kingdom of Fear, published in 2003. It was his last completed book (other than a collection of his essays from espn.com called Hey Rube), and this brief selection from it encompasses a lot of what I love about his writing: his wonderful sense of rhythm, the beauty of his word usage, the elegance of his phrasing, his eye for a musical phrase. RIP HST.

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Whoops! How about a break, people? How about some Music? Yes. Music is where it's at, so consider this:

I am a confused Musician who got sidetracked into this goddamn Word business for so long that I never got back into music --except maybe when I find myself oddly alone in a quiet room with only a typewriter to strum on and a yen to write a song. Who knows why? Maybe I just feel like singing --so I type.

These quick electric keys are my Instrument, my harp, my RCA glass-tube microphone, and my fine soprano saxophone all at once. That is my music, for good or ill, and on some night it will make me feel like a god. Veni, Vidi, Vici. . . . That is when the fun starts. . . . Yes, Kenneth, this is the frequency. This is where the snow leopards live; "Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round. . . ."

Herman Melville said that, and I have found it to be true, but I didn't really know what it felt like until I started feeling those shocks myself, which always gave me a rush. . . .

So perhaps we can look at some of my work (or all of it, on some days) as genetically governed by my frustrated musical failures, which led to an overweening sublimation of my essentially musical instincts that surely haunt me just as clearly as they dominate my lyrics.

-- November 19th, 2000

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