that night in Chicago

Hunter Thompson wanted to feel what it was like to write like F. Scott Fitzgerald, so he typed out The Great Gatsby.

I want to feel what it's like to write like Hunter Thompson, so I could type out The Great Shark Hunt.

--------------------------- [excerpt] ----------------- Richard Nixon is living in the White House today because of what happened that night in Chicago.  Hubert Humphrey lost that election by a handful of votes -- mine among them -- and if I had to do it again I would still vote for Dick Gregory.

     If nothing else, I take a certain pride in knowing that I helped spare the nation eight years of President Humphrey -- an Administration that would have been equally corrupt and wrongheaded as Richard Nixon's, far more devious, and probably just competent enough to keep the ship of state from sinking until 1976.  

Then with the boiler about to explode from eight years of blather and neglect, Humphrey's cold-war liberals could have fled down the ratlines and left the disaster to whoever inherited it.


     Nixon, at least, was blessed with a mixture of arrogance and stupidity that caused him to blow the boilers almost immediately after taking command.  

By bringing in hundreds of thugs, fixers and fascists to run the Government, he was able to crank almost every problem he touched into a mindbending crisis. ---------------------------- [Hunter Thompson]

--------------------------- [Gatsby excerpt] ------------------------- ...I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.
     "You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously.  "I know somebody there."

     "I don't know a single -- --"
     "You must know Gatsby."
     "Gatsby?" demanded Daisy.  "What Gatsby?"

     Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

     Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

     "Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning.  She snapped them out with her fingers.  "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year."  

She looked at us all radiantly.  "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it?  I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it." ---------------------- [Fitzgerald]

_____________________________________

{The Great Shark Hunt:  Strange Tales from a Strange Time (Gonzo Papers, Volume 1).  Hunter S. Thompson.  Simon & Schuster, 1979.}

{The Great Gatsby.  F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.}

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