Thank You, Hunter S. Thompson

"Life is a gradual release from ignorance."
--Bob Braudis, in Memo from the Sheriff from Hunter S. Thompson's Kingdom of Fear

Hunter S. Thompson made a crackpot career of typing the spiritual rantings of a depraved American individualist high and tweaked-out on the confluence of an inordinate amount of drugs, social interactions, political struggles, and general fearlessness in the face of bullshit. He is an inspiration, as much as the softer, more yielding, pliable, grassy side of me hates to admit. From him as much as Inga Muscio, I feel more free to fuckin' fuck fuck swear the goddamn shitty day away in all my own personal asinine piss-ass rants. Self-effacement is another quality he had, in a weird sort of way. He never let his ego get too big, even as he never let fuckheads walk all over him. He struck an amazing balance between generosity and being full-on 24/7 aware that there are just a whole bunch of assholes out there who will run the fuck right over you and shit-grin to put you away for life.

"Paranoia is just another word for ignorance," or some other such line is found between the covers of Kingdom of Fear. I still don't understand this. Parnoia = Ignornace? I'm trying to do the equation here. I feel paranoid from time to time, but don't consider myself ignorant. And Thompson himself, tweaked out on mescaline and cocaine, twisting around over his shoulder with bulging eyes, seemed ever-vigilant in his defense against the accursed "Them." Paranoia? Ignorance? Two sides of the same rant?

Blah. That bald man blessed us with a human vision of freedom that far outstrips Walt Whitman and his dull Leaves of Grass. Me, me, me, is the credo of Walt Whitman and his super self (take this with a grain of salt please, I've never read much of Whitman--don't much like what I have read--so I don't know what the hell I am typing about). Thompson burned all his credos through his blasted bat-out-of-hell truck drivin' style of writin'. He was all chain smoking until the end, which came for him after he put down a phone on the other end of which metaphorically dangled his young wife Anita. "Hold on a minute," he had said, or something to that effect. Before that, he had been telling her that someone was going to kill him. "I know how these bastards think," he had said.

The political climate was post-9/11 dumbed down U-S-A! PATRIOT ACT(iv?)ism, and Thompson had been talking about the collapse of the World Trade Centers and how the official story was hogwash bullshit, as most official stories are (another thing Thomspon said), and he knew that this made him unpopular with a whole faction of war-mongering fascist bastards. Not one to keep quiet, Hunter kept on, holed up in his compound for sure, but free, free in a way that the majority of so-called Americans in the 21st century don't even stop to think about. On the way to their "jobs" with their "insurance" and doing 40-80 hours worth of "work" (or is it "time"?) a week to either make ends meet (I feel most sorry for these people--not leastwise 'cuz I fear someday not too far from this little slice of heaven I'm soaking it up in I may have to join their enslaved ranks) OR--and these are the fuckers that are truly detestable, pathetic, and dumb--'cuz that's just how it is, folks, and we gotta all get ahead, work hard, and buy, buy, buy our way to the top. Just the way the world works. Fuck those people. If life is a gradual release form ignorance, people like that are dead getting deader.

Stop paying into the machine that rapes and enslaves us all! Wake the fuckity fuck fuck up to the birthright of genius inside of you that guides us all. Quit tapping on Big Brother for guidance. That asshole has led us all into a blind alley and now wants to eat our brains with a plastic spoon, then throw the spoon in the plastic garbage can. Little employed garbage men will come to take the spoon and a whole bunch of other shit away to a landfill, and they'll reprocess our bodies to make a new genetically-modified strain of reduced fat, low sodium Nabisco crackers, which will be sold at a 500% profit. How does it feel to be part of an economic system of exploitation?