Postcards from the Road to Ruin

I told Mnemosyne that I’d been scouring the internet for clips of interviews with Hunter S. Thompson, looking for inspiration.

“That’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one,” she quipped.

“How do you figure?”

“HT generally makes me want to take out life insurance in case of possible insanity,” she explained.

I could see her point. It’s easy to lose the forest for the trees where Thompson is concerned. In a 1978 BBC interview, Thompson himself wondered where to draw the line between himself and his avatar, Raoul Duke. How do you separate the myth from the man? At what point do you ignore Duke’s antics long enough to listen to what Thompson has to say?

A favorite passage of mine, devoid of blotter acid, ether and giant bats:

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era–the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time–and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark–that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas