------------------ [Hunter Thompson excerpt] --------------------
The girl riding with me tonight is looking for an old boyfriend who moved out of Boston and is now living, she says, in a chicken coop in a sort of informal commune near Greenville, N.H. It is five or six degrees above zero outside and she doesn't even have a blanket, much less a sleeping bag, but this doesn't worry her. "I guess it sounds crazy," she explains. "We don't even sleep together. He's just a friend. But I'm happy when I'm with him because he makes me like myself."
Jesus, I thought. We've raised a generation of stone desperate cripples. She is twenty-two, a journalism grad from Boston University, and now--six months out of college--she talks so lonely and confused that she is eagerly looking forward to spending a few nights in a frozen chicken coop with some poor bastard who doesn't even know she's coming.
The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era--but nobody guessed, back then, that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.
The girl was not interested in whatever reasons I might have for going up to Manchester to spend a few days with the McGovern campaign. She had no plans to vote in any election, for President or anything else.
She tried to be polite, but it was obvious after two or three minutes of noise that she didn't know what the fuck I was talking about, and cared less. It was boring; just another queer hustle in a world full of bummers that will swarm you every time if you don't keep moving.
Like her ex-boyfriend. At first he was only stoned all the time, but now he was shooting smack and acting very crazy. He would call and say he was on his way over, then not show up for three days--and then he'd be out of his head, screaming at her, not making any sense.
It was too much, she said. She loved him, but he seemed to be drifting away.
--------------------------------------
{Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson. Copyright 1973, Straight Arrow Books.}
______________________
On You Tube, type in
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young "Ohio"
channel / uploader: HardRainProductions
♪ ♪ and Play ♫
The song is about Kent State -- the anti-war protest that took place on May 4, 1970.
(I used to hear this in the '70s, and I thought they said "forget - ing Ohio" but they were saying "four dead in Ohio," I figured out later....)
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment