Looks all Dr. Hunter S. Thompsonesque, but this shit wouldn’t get a fly high.
I haven’t had a good hard sock in the snotlocker since the Before-Time, when I was shambling around half -drunk among the sneezers, wheezers and squeezers infesting the Interbike trade show in Sin City, chronicling the ups and downs of the bicycle biz for one magazine or another.
But I got one this fall, the sort that requires medical intervention, and just in time for the 2024 pestilential erection, too.
A daily fistful of antibiotics and steroids may cure what ails the sinuses but doesn’t do shit for the psyche as the electorate inexplicably sends the Clown Prince of Mar-a-Lago and his battalion of bozos back to the Oval Office to finish the job of putting the Republic up on blocks and stripping it for salable parts.
I can’t find a physician’s assistant who’ll write me a ’scrip for mescaline, psilocybin, or Old Reliable, the fabled L-S-Dizzy, not even at urgent care. And oy, is this ever a case for urgent care.
So I guess we’ll have to rely on talk therapy. Which means – yes, yes, yes —it’s time for another dose of Radio Free Dogpatch. Sorry; doctor’s orders. Look on the bright side — it’s not a suppository.
“I hate to get hit myself as it digs a hole you don’t quite get out of for a couple of weeks.” — Brown Dog in “The Seven-Ounce Man,” by Jim Harrison
Brown Dog, a.k.a. B.D., didn’t burn a lot of daylight worrying about politics or getting his ass kicked.
He got drawn into both from time to time, as we all do. But they didn’t leave any lasting marks on him. Not for long, anyway.
Preparing to do battle with a couple of bruisers whose women he’d been romancing B.D. mused that “it wasn’t likely to be the end of the world, just a real expensive way to pay for getting laid a few times.”
All the world cares about, his grandfather once told him, is that you get to work on time.
Well. Shit. We got boned and beat up last Tuesday. I still feel as though I’m down in that hole, but I guess it’s time to get back to work.
I’d love to stick around, but I’m running behind. …
The power went out at 12:53 a.m., and the heat went with it. The wind is howling, and the snow is flying.
So this is a quick-and-dirty post via iPhone hotspot of a companion piece to yesterday’s post that I had hoped to nail up here last night, only to be derailed by the fabled technical difficulties.
Yes, yes, yes, it’s another abbreviated edition of Radio Free Dogpatch.
• Technical notes: Still using the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic massage. The gunfire comes from Freesound. All the other bad noise is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.
We’d bailed on election-night coverage as it slouched inexorably toward its denouement because someone around here has to get up at stupid-thirty to make us some money. Not me.
If I had dreams, I don’t remember them. But I do remember something Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post said during the PBS coverage last night.
It was a particularly fatheaded pronouncement, even for an associate editor of The Washington Post. And I didn’t make a note of it because I’d said something similar the first time TFG flipped his wig into the ring. That the 2016 election would show us who we were as a country.
Plenty of us already knew what we were then. Not enough, though. But surely anyone who has been paying attention since has caught up. Right?
Well, there’s the phone, on the nightstand. It’s not my practice to take the pulse of the planet before coffee, but I could hear Herself prepping in the bathroom and thought that if I got cracking I could make her a bite of breakfast before she left. If she had any appetite.
And so I picked up the phone.
Well, the rest you know. Another massive breakdown of politics, press, and populace. We’re just waiting on the details, is all.
Hunter S. Thompson has already filed his report, of course. He had the scoop after my first election, in 1972, when he wrote:
This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
[George] McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.
Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?
We still don’t know the answer to that one, Hunter old sot. The barrel appears to have no bottom.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla mans (cats?) the National Affairs Desk in our bedroom.
It was not quite 4:30, and I was not quite up.
I was awake, rolled up in the blankets like a strip of bacon in a breakfast burrito. But I was in no rush to get unwrapped, gnawed on, and shat out by Election Day 2024.
My Gonzo pin, a gift from a friend during my own Gonzo period.
Like Mike’s bankruptcy in “The Sun Also Rises,” it has finally arrived: “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Don’t worry. I haven’t been reading Ernest Hemingway in the run-up to The Big Show. No, I’ve been wallowing in bits of this and that from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.
The Good Doktor wrote madly about The Edge, until he finally stepped over it. Nineteen years later, dead by suicide, cremated, and shot from a cannon by Johnny Depp, he still has more class — albeit in a certain Hell’s Angels style — and gave more service to his country than many a president.
Writing about the Hell’s Angels in his book of the same name, HST described people like the ones Herself recently saw herding flamboyantly Trump-flagged pickups up and down Tramway, horns honking:
“They are out of the ball game and they know it, (so) they spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand … Instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the (establishment) for good or ill. (That) gives them a power and a purpose that nothing else seems to offer.”
He may have been a bit premature with the second volume of his “Gonzo Papers,” titled “Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s.” If he had kicked his dope-soaked alter ego Raoul Duke to the curb and survived to see this generation of swine — HST would be 87 today — he might have looked back on the ’80s with a certain fondness, even longing.
Describing the difference between the ’60s and the ’80s, between the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, he wrote:
The criminals in Watergate knew they were guilty and so did everybody else; and when the dust cleared the crooked president was gone and so were all the others. They were criminals and they had the same contempt for the whole concept of democracy that these cheap punks have been strutting every day. …”
Don’t you wonder what he’d have had to say about the 45th president — impeached twice, beaten in his bid for re-election, tried to reverse the defeat with violence and chicanery, obviously insane, declining hourly — and still within a whisker of winning a second term, going two for three? I know I do.
HST mentioned that guy only in passing, as far as I can recall. But he took note of Joe Biden’s first major presidential-election meltdown over a plagiarism scandal at law school in the ’60s. The candidate who hopes to succeed Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, had won her first election — as San Francisco district attorney — just three years before HST died in 2005.
So, yeah. HST left the party too early for a change, and more’s the pity. He wasn’t always right, and sometimes wasn’t even readable. But when he was on his game the Good Doktor could walk with the King. Or savage him. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be reading right now as we all tiptoe toward The Edge once again.
Here he is again, quoting John Keats instead of his personal fave, the Book of Revelation:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
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