Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Good doc edition

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Movie Millisecond: You-know-what country

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998). I saw this movie opening weekend just exactly as the good Doctor Gonzo would’ve liked me to: stoned out of my pretty little gourd. Too stoned, in fact, to realize that I was on a “date” and not a “seeing a movie together with my coworker occasion” until my date started talking about how much fun he was having on our date. I was noncomittal, highly platonic in all I said and did, and skedaddled straight home after the show.

I tried to go back again the following week with ancient friendoh Paolo and, though it had only been playing in our somewhat rural area for one week, Fear and Loathing had already been pulled from the screen. We saw The Truman Show instead, and, three quarters of the way through the film, someone began beating insistently on the other side of the rear exit door that faced the alley behind the theater. They were pretty violent and persistent — there were obvious kicks and muffled shouts — but finally went away.

However, the startling and dangerous impression the knocking and kicking left stayed with the crowd: when the movie ended, everyone sort of milled around instead of leaving the theater right away. No one openly said it, but I believe that none of us wanted to be the first out the door in case the knocker was still out there. He didn’t sound like someone who’d forgotten his jacket during the last show. But why, then, did not a single one of us get up and leave the theater before? Why did we all sit there during the knocking, just waiting with dread for whatever came next?

It was a weird and surreal experience, a reminder that by its very nature violence is an unpredictable eruption, and that in the face of such an eruption, many of us can only freeze with fear and indecision. We could not have looked more like sheep nervously peering out of their enclosure, on guard for a wolf. But what I’m saying is you can’t really ever guard against that, can you? It’s all bat country.

Advice: HST umpteenth edition

“In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile, and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together; not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.”

(Hunter S. Thompson. Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time. New York: Summit Books, 1979.)

Doorway to “Values.” Get it.

“‘Happy,’ I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words like Love, that I never quite understood.

Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception—especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony.

I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest of a fool to use them with any confidence.”

(Hunter S. Thompson. The Rum Diary. London: Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1998.)

Set in San Juan, Puerto Rico, The Rum Diary is a semi-autobiographical but mainly fiction novel which the good doc wrote in the 60’s but did not publish until 1998, soon to be a major motion picture starring his good friend and somewhat of a mentee, Johnny Depp, who is probably excited as shit to get to do a project he believes in and not play Captain Jack Sparrow again. (Disney slipped a clause into his contract where they get to cut off his wife’s fingers if he doesn’t appear in their convoluted bullshit. Did You Know?)

Speaking of rum, I’m’a finish some housework, then grab a case of Diet Coke and scootch on down to C-town for some mandatory spirit-lifting, this-is-deep-shit, soul-plunging chitty chat time with Paolo and Miss D and this guy Sailor Jerry.

Last night we had pizza and busted out the Scrabble diamond anniversary edition I’d got Paolo for his birthday and I only beat him by ten points in the very last part of the game. This is completely unacceptable because I need to crush him and use his bones for jelly on a piece of toast I’ve made of bread baked from the dust of his finely-ground flesh.

We’re a little competitive.

It’s a rivalry that began in 1986, which makes it a needless game of oneupmanship old enough to vote, buy alcohol, and be in the second year of a postgraduate degree. Shit, maybe it's time to bury the hatchet. I'm sure it would make Miss D happy, although she says she has gotten used to our bickering. She just shakes her head at us, the poor girl.

We'll see. Don't take any wooden nickels, have a super-duper-neato Saturday, and I'll catch you guys on the flip!