one thing I think you should know

-------------------------Dawn is coming up in San Francisco now:  6:09 A.M.  I can hear the rumble of early morning buses under my window at the Seal Rock Inn . . . out here at the far end of Geary Street:  this is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America.  From my desk I can see the dark jagged hump of "Seal Rock" looming out of the ocean in the grey morning light.------------------

[excerpt, "Author's Note" at the beginning of Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter Thompson (Copyright 1973, Straight Arrow Books) -- the author's note / introduction written Jan., 1973]----------------

-------------- About two hundred seals have been barking out there most of the night.  Staying in this place with the windows open is like living next to a dog pound.  Last night we had a huge paranoid poodle up here in the room, and the dumb bastard went totally out of control when the seals started barking -- racing around the room like a chicken hearing a pack of wolves outside the window, howling & whining, leaping up on the bed & scattering my book-galley pages all over the floor, knocking the phone off the hook, upsetting the gin bottles, trashing my carefully organized stacks of campaign photographs . . . off to the right of this typewriter, on the floor between the beds, I can see an 8x10 print of Frank Mankiewicz yelling into a telephone at the Democratic Convention in Miami; but that one will never be used, because the goddamn hound put five big claw-holes in the middle of Frank's chest.

That dog will not enter this room again.  He came in with the book-editor, who went away about six hours ago with thirteen finished chapters -- the bloody product of fifty-five consecutive hours of sleepless, foodless, high-speed editing.  But there was no other way to get the thing done.  I am not an easy person to work with, in terms of deadlines.  When I arrived in San Francisco to put this book together, they had a work-hole set up for me downtown at the Rolling Stone office . . . but I have a powerful aversion to working in offices, and when I didn't show up for three or four days they decided to do the only logical thing:  move the office out here to the Seal Rock Inn.

One afternoon about three days ago they showed up at my door, with no warning, and loaded aobut forty pounds of supplies into the room:  two cases of Mexican beer, four quarts of gin, a dozen grapefruits, and enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls.  There was also a big Selectric typewriter, two reams of paper, a face-cord of oak firewood and three tape recorders -- in case the situation got so desperate that I might finally have to resort to verbal composition.

We came to this point sometime around the thirty-third hour, when I developed an insoluble Writer's Block and began dictating big chunks of the book straight into the microphone -- pacing around the room at the end of an eighteen-foot cord and saying anything that came into my head.  When we reached the end of a tape the editor would jerk it out of the machine and drop it into a satchel . . . 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.

=====================
...One thing -- I think you should know...
I ain't gonna miss you when you go.
Been down so long,
I've been tossed around enough...
Oh, won't you just let me go down
and do my stuff?

I know -- you're hoping to find
Someone who's gonna give you peace of mind.
When times go bad,
when times go rough...

{outtake from "Second Hand News" - Lindsey Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac.  Rumours album -- Feb. 1977}

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