in the warm Pacific dusk

[Hunter Thompson book, Campaign trail '72 - excerpt]---------

December 1971

Is This Trip Necessary? . . . Strategic Retreat into National Politics . . . Two Minutes & One Gram Before Midnight on the Pennsylvania Turnpike . . . Setting Up the National Affairs Desk . . . Can Georgetown Survive the Black Menace? . . . Fear and Loathing in Washington . . .

OUTSIDE MY NEW FRONT DOOR the street is full of leaves.  My lawn slopes down to the sidewalk; the grass is still green, but the life is going out of it.  Red berries wither on the tree beside my white colonial stoop.  In the driveway my Volvo with blue leather seats and Colorado plates sits facing the brick garage.  And right next to the car is a cord of new firewood:  pine, elm, and cherry.  I burn a vicious amount of firewood these days . . . even more than the Alsop brothers.

When a man gives up drugs he wants big fires in his life -- all night long, every night, huge flames in the fireplace & the volume turned all the way up.  I have ordered  more speakers to go with my new McIntosh amp -- and also a fifty watt "boombox" for the FM car radio.

You want good strong seatbelts with the boombox, they say, because otherwise the bass riffs will bounce you around inside like a goddamn ping-pong ball . . . a very bad act in traffic; especially along these elegant boulevards of Our Nation's Capital.

One of the best and most beneficial things about coming East now and then is that it tends to provoke a powerful understanding of the "Westward Movement" in U.S. history.  After a few years on the Coast or even in Colorado you tend to forget just exactly what it was that put you on the road, going west, in the first place.  You live in L.A. a while and before long you start cursing traffic jams on the freeways in the warm Pacific dusk . . . and you tend to forget that in New York City you can't even park; forget about driving.

Even in Washington, which is still a relatively loose and open city in terms of traffic, it costs me about $1.50 an hour every time I park downtown . . . which is nasty:  but the shock is not so much the money-cost as the rude understanding that it is no longer considered either sane or natural to park on the city streets.  If you happen to find a spot beside an open parking meter you don't dare use it, because the odds are better than even that somebody will come along and either steal your car or reduce it to twisted rubble because you haven't left the keys in it.

There is nothing unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti and all the windows smashed . . . for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it's at these days.

Where indeed? ----------------------- [end excerpt]

=========================

For you, there'll be no more crying,
For you, the sun will be shining,
And I feel that when I'm with you,
It's all right, I know it's right

To you, I'll give the world
to you, I'll never be cold
'Cause I feel that when I'm with you,
It's all right -- I know it's right.

And the songbirds are singing,
Like they know the score,
And I love you, I love you, I love you,
Like never before.

And I wish you all the love in the world,
But most of all, I wish it from myself.

And the songbirds keep singing,
Like they know the score,
And I love you, I love you, I love you,
Like never before...Like never before. ...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{first excerpt -- Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72 - Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973 - San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books)
{song -- "Songbird," by Christine McVie.  Rumours album.  Fleetwood Mac.  Warner Bros.  1977.}

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