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58161f1
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October is the cruelest month of any election year, but by then, the pain is so great that even the strong are like jelly and time has lost all meaning for anybody still involved in a political campaign. By that time, even candidates running unopposed have abandoned all hope of victory and live only for the day when they will finally be free to seek vengeance on all those treacherous bastards who once passed themselves off as loyal friends ..
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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c4312df
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Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.
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politics
liberalism
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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b2e44dd
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All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into t..
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people
existential
americans
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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6d3acd2
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The difference between the student radicals and the Hell's Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future. Their only common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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c617872
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We would be attending the conference under false pretenses and dealing, from the start, with a crowd that was convened for the stated purpose of putting people like us in jail. We were the Menace - not in disguise, but stone-obvious drug abusers, with a flagrantly cranked-up act that we intended to push all the way to the limit...not to prove any final, sociological point, and not event as a conscious mockery: It was mainly a matter of life..
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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901e861
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I bought a small bottle of beer for fifteen cents and sat on a bench in the clearing, feeling like an old man. The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories - not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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71c2dfc
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McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for. Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?
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president
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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1ed33cb
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Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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bec886c
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This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it--that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
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gun-culture
used-car-salesmen
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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2163a3e
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This wavering paradox is a pillar of the outlaw stance. A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit-no matter how often he's reminded of it-that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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314f71f
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As your attorney I advise you to get the chiliburger. It's a hamburger with chili on it.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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480f08f
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The only way to prepare for a trip like this, I felt, was to dress up like human peacocks and get crazy, then screech off across the desert and cover the story.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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0a29108
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Some book reviewer whose name I forget recently called me a 'vicious misanthrope' . . . or maybe it was a 'cynical misanthrope'. . . but either way, he (or she) was right; and what got me this way was .
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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63d7b8d
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It is difficult for the ordinary voter to come to grips with the notion that a truly
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war
politics
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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ae2524b
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My own acid-eating experience is limited in terms of total consumption, but widely varied as to company and circumstances ... and if I had a choice of repeating any one of the half dozen bouts I recall, I would choose one of those Hell's Angels parties in La Honda, complete with all the mad lighting, cops on the road, a Ron Boise sculpture looming out of the woods, and all the big speakers vibrating with Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." It..
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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48dac7d
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It was necessary, we felt, to thoroughly terrify our opponents, so that even in hollow victory, they would learn to fear every sunrise ...
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quotes-to-live-by
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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2fdcdd3
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There is an important difference between the words 'losers' and 'outlaw.' One is passive and the other is active, and the main reason the Angels are such good copy is that they are acting out the day-dreams of millions of losers who don't wear any defiant insignia and who don't know how to be outlaws. The streets of every city are thronged with men who would pay all the money they could get their hands on to be transformed-even for a day-in..
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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a5c35a5
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I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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a18a958
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I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless journey. It was the tension between the..
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fear
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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88e6b5a
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So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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376b4af
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You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways--but it doesn't hurt as much when you're right.
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truth
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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6bc1111
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One of the things you learn, after years of dealing with drug people, is that everything is serious. You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug--especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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48eaa4b
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He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all y..
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fate
existential
luck
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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086cecb
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Across the board... Not junkies or freaks, but people who were just as comfortable with drugs like weed, booze, or coke as we are - and we're not weird, are we? Hell no, we're just overworked professionals who need to relax now and then, have a bit of the whoop and the giggle, right?
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morality
past
philosophy
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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302a031
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There was no sense in blowing everything away for the sake of some violent ape I'd never even met.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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b23ea86
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There was also the fact that sending a penniless writer to get $135 worth of beer was -- as Khrushchev said of Nixon -- 'like sending a goat to tend the cabbage'.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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3eedba9
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In a nervous society where a man's image is frequently more important than his reality, the only people who can afford to advertise their drug menus are those with nothing to lose.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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4abd358
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They claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.
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luck
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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9adf044
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The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without first-expierience is a fool and a fraud.
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drug-use
gonzo
psychedelics
journalism
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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d3699c9
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It was wonderful, a stunning happy ending to what began as another tragic rock & roll story, as if Bob Dylan had been arrested in Miami for jacking off in a seedy little XXX theater while stroking the spine of a fat young boy.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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b53235e
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It had been a bad trip ... fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz' final words from the heart of darkness: "The horror! The horror! ... Exterminate all the brutes!" --
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exterminate
horror
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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514561c
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Every time I think of Tim Leary I get angry. He was a liar and a quack and a worse human being than Richard Nixon. For the last twenty-six years of his life he worked as an informant for the FBI and turned his friends into the police and betrayed the peace symbol he hid behind.
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hunter-s-thompson
timothy-leary
fbi
betrayal
police
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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1ad1a86
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Hit him again, Jack! He's crazy!
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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d1bc1e1
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But from now on let's try to be careful when we're around people I know. You won't sketch them and I won't Mace them. We'll just try to relax and get drunk.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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784fb66
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There was also the socio-psychic factor. Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To as it were, in the womb of the desert sun. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a pint of ether.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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5601d41
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The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes.
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wipe-out
survival
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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2736332
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a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody--or at least some force--is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic ... a blind faith in some higher and wiser "authori..
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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7765f37
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Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant....And that, I think, was the handle--that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point i..
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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c5bf87c
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Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people, anyway. For years I've regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.
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insult
politics
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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0b36401
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This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails--eat the wounded. In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
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nihilism
society
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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43d03d8
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On the way down the hill we walked three abreast in the cobblestone street, drunk and laughing and talking like men who knew they would separate at dawn and travel to the far corners of the earth.
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stroll
drunk
journey
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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513160a
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Life just seems too huge and too fascinating for me to begin thinking about curing my restlessness at this stage of the game. Maybe later.
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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125076f
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California, Labor Day weekend...early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Fricso, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur...The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in..
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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1772e78
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Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something, croak this awful habit of not ever getting to the end- of anything.
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Hunter S. Thompson |