Gonzo Papers, Vol. 3
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

23::November::2010 21:41 → permalink

February 18

L.A. notes, again . . . one-thirty now and pill-fear grips the brain, staring down at this half-finished article . . . test pilots, after a week (no, three days) at Edwards AFB in the desert . . . but trying to mix writing and fucking around with old friends don’t work no more, this maddening, time-killing late-work syndrome, never getting down to the real machine action until two or three at night, won’t make it . . . especially half drunk full of pills and grass with deadlines past and people howling in New York . . . the pressure piles up like a hang-fire lightning ball in the brain. Tired and wiggy from no sleep or at least not enough. Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something, croak this awful habit of not ever getting to the end — of anything. — Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson, H.S., 1991. Songs of the Doomed: more notes on the death of the American dream, New York, NY: Pocket Books.

The narrative elsewhere in this blog lacks the edge that Thompson eventuated in his published works. Compact bursts of driving prose — the energy of which does not rely on the gonzo subject material — but instead brings directly to life the internal processes of be-ing and places them in direct juxtaposition with the madness of what’s out there. This is the trick: and it is precisely this trick, when the two flows are brought together, synthesized, and ultimately exposed to oxygen to be reduced and transformed into a sustenance for the human spirit.

That spirit is then taken to places it needs to be, not where the mutations of socialized comparison point it to, not where material consumability takes it, not to where fear in all its phantasmal coloration deLights to compress the soul into. The soul needs to be able to expand, not contract. And it should have within itself a means to source for this infinite expansion. Should, would, could. For the infinite, there are no means, there is only the denominated will of the spirit — which, in the end, forces a division by zero.

And that’s an illegitimate operation. As is Gonzo generally.

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