...I keep my visions to myself

--------------...and every twelve hours or so a messenger would stop by to pick up the tape satchel and take it downtown to the office, where unknown persons transcribed it onto manuscript paper and sent it straight to the printer in Reno.--------------

[Hunter Thompson excerpt]

------------------ There is a comfortable kind of consistency in this kind of finish, because that's the way all the rest of the book was written.  From December '71 to January '73 -- in airport bars, all-nite coffee shops and dreary hotel rooms all over the country -- there is hardly a paragraph in this jangled saga that wasn't produced in a last-minute, teeth-grinding frenzy. 

There was never enough time. 

Every deadline was a crisis. 

All around me were experienced professional journalists meeting deadlines far more frequent than mine, but I was never able to learn from their example.  Reporters like Bill Greider from the Washington Post and Jim Naughton of the New York Times, for instance, had to file long, detailed, and relatively complex stories every day -- while my own deadline fell every two weeks -- but neither one of them ever seemed in a hurry about getting their work done, and from time to time they would try to console me about the terrible pressure I always seemed to be laboring under.

Any $100-an-hour psychiatrist could probably explain this problem to me, in thirteen or fourteen sessions, but I don't have time for that.  No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland. . . . On the other hand, it might easily be something as simple & basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car.

People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity, and Craziness.  But I have spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines:  eat, [make love], sleep, hop around a bush now & then. . . . No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while;

there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels.

Why not?  Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol . . . but too many adrenalin rushes in any given time-span has the same bad effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain:  after a while you start burning out the circuits.

When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, it is only a matter of time before he gets smashed -- and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.

Some of the scenes in this book will not make much sense to anybody except the people who were involved in them.  Politics has its own language, which is often so complex that it borders on being a code, and the main trick in political journalism is learning how to translate -- to make sense of the partisan bullshit that even your friends will lay on you -- without crippling your access to the kind of information that allows you to keep functioning. 

Covering a presidential campaign is not a hell of a lot different from getting a long-term assignment to cover a newly elected District Attorney who made a campaign promise to "crack down on Organized Crime."  In both cases, you find unexpected friends on both sides, and in order to protect them -- and to keep them as sources of private information -- you wind up knowing a lot of things you can't print....------------------------------------- {end excerpt}

================
...Thunder only happens when it's raining
Players only love you when they're playing
Say .. Women ... they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean .. you'll know

Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself
It's only me
Who wants -- to wrap around your dreams and ...
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
Dreams of loneliness ...
Like a heartbeat ... drives you mad ...
In the stillness of remembering what you had ...
And what you lost ...
and what you had ...
And what you lost

Thunder only happens when it's raining
Players only love you when they're playing...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{first excerpt, "author's note / introduction," Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973.  San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books}
{second excerpt, "Dreams," written by Stevie Nicks, Rumours album, recorded by Fleetwood Mac, Warner Bros. label, released Feb. 1977.}

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