“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.”
― Hunter S. Thompson
…. Truth is we can’t walk around brimming with such sentimentality showing our vulnerable side, so we learn to protect ourselves through obfuscation – that’s until we become the very obfuscation. It’s only in realizing what is happening that we don’t let our obfuscation become us. Hunter Thompson loved to obfuscate his sentimentality. Sentimentality that’s easily be masked by the bizarre and extreme, and if some night your belief indeed turns to fact, when your car, needle on empty, does run about fifty miles just because the right music is on and loud enough, then you know for sure that your fueling sentimentality has pushed you into bizarre territory where there is no honest way to explain the edge because the only people who really know it are the ones who have gone over. (“Oh, and it only works at night. It’s bizarre…. And not that you’ll somehow be entrapped, but once you get locked into the feeling of going over the edge, there is this tendency to push it as far as you can. It’s absolutely bizarre!)
But then again, it’s not so bizarre to walk around carrying so much hope and watching it come through for you, every once in a while.
Sometimes, bizarre could be something doing exactly what they need to be doing, when you least expect them to be doing it. Sometimes it is in your own wondering if the cure really works, when you see the incredulity of a man perched on top of an electrical transformer, stealing oil because he believes it will cure arthritis. Other times it is in ‘intelligent-font’ that you find it written, as instructions to a hotel shower cap that reads “For one head only”. It’s absolutely bizarre, yet when expressed it turns humorous. Then there is the bizarre derivation of hunter’s wisdom from places that are vile, vitriolic, violent, corrupt and excessive but seem to inspire an ownership; an honest journey to find meaning and cause behind dark expressions and practices.
Yet it doesn’t seem so outrageous that Hunter Thomson willed his ashes to be shot out of a 153-foot cannon perched on top of ‘Gonzo’ statue – a two thumbed fist clutching a peyote button. His wish was granted. Johnny Depp had the honors to commemorate his send off. The neighbors were delighted to watch Hunter get shot out of a cannon- “We always wanted to see hunter shot!”
It is impossible to capture the contrast called Hunter Thompson. Only shades of him can be conveyed, mostly easily in his extremes and excesses but it is not difficult to find sentimentality, wisdom and the beautifully elucidated heartbreak, well obfuscated in the documentation of extreme and excess. In ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, describing the failure of the 60’s counterculture, hunter writes:
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. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .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.”
As for his counterintuitive derivation of wisdom, in a letter seeking his advice, he writes:
And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. But why not float if you have no goal? That is another question. It is unquestionably better to enjoy the floating than to swim in uncertainty. The answer— and, in a sense, the tragedy of life— is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis? So Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.
“Oh, how you surely see the light shining, through the cracks in the broken ones!” And in that light, through the ‘cracks’ of Hunter, we see the Scorsese Red.
“Find an event. Immerse yourself in it. Become the story! “(And don’t ever let it get weird enough for yourself!!)
And if you’re able to do that, then you find yourself on the fringes, where the strange music begins, where you don’t have to worry about colors bleeding into one another – they don’t need to be layered anymore; now you don’t see or hear them in absolution – they turn into shades and tones; shades and tones added to an already existing canvas or story – like Scorsese’s shade of red.
Far, for now, from any wisdom and sentimentality, the Scorsese Red is a manic, first-person narrative of itself! There’s a roar to the aroma – both a revving roar and a thunderous riding roar of a phalanx of Harleys, you hear long before you get invaded by its flavors! About to ‘Break Bad’, the flavors feel like they have been pushed to their edge yet seem to have taken a bold stand to extract meaning and wisdom rather than succumb to the grotesquerie and violence. Loitering the edges, loud in their war cries, are the notes of Wood and Nuts and Malt and Chocolate and Cinnamon and Coconut and Tobacco and Vanilla. What you hear first or what you hear last, we know not, but like artillery, you hear them all in deafening clarity! “The Nepenthe seems to be working, now”. Yet, there seems to be no urgency in their lunacy, neither in the dry leaf aroma of nuts, condensed milk and vanilla nor the brewed leaf that seem like outlaw stomping grounds full of weathered leather and cheap perfume. It’s bewildering! There’s only one thing that feels like clarity – anger! Whether it’s clarity or anger – we leave up to you but something’s definitely been pushed to its edge! Not to mention, the leaves themselves spring from a wild cultivar called Bhime.
It’s Alligator wine; It’s swamp water brew; It’s Walked 47 miles of barbed wire wearing a cobra snake for a necktie; It’s about to ‘Break Bad’, looking for Lawyers, Guns and Money; It’s asking “There’s no such thing as 470 proof alcohol, is there!!??”
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.