|
8eb4869
|
In a generation of swine, the one-eyed pig is king.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
57bc254
|
For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
8053f3f
|
I was glad to be rid of him. He was one of those people who could go to New York and be "fascinating," but here in his own world he was just a cheap functionary, and a dull one at that."
|
|
irritating
poseurs
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
a09769a
|
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era--the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. 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 ..
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
0edc96e
|
The Hell's Angels are very definitely a lower-class phenomenon, but their backgrounds are not necessarily poverty-stricken. Despite some grim moments, their parents seem to have had credit. Most of the outlaws are the sons of people who came to California either just before or during World War II. Many have lost contact with their families, and I have never met an Angel who claimed to have a hometown in any sense that people who use that te..
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
f7d3ac1
|
The New York power failure was not the first time the Hell's Angels have confounded the forces of decency and got off scot-free. They are incredibly devious. Law enforcement officials have compared their guile to that of the snipe, a wily beast that many have seen but few have ever trapped. This is because the snipe has the ability to transform himself, when facing capture, into something entirely different. The only other animals capable o..
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
2e98040
|
The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph. Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer ..
|
|
writing
sports
wit
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
9833f51
|
These are bad times for people who like to sit outside the library at dawn on a rainy morning and get ripped to the tits on crank and powerful music.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
e6ac1e4
|
I am still vaguely haunted by our hitchhiker's remark about how he'd "never rode in a convertible before." Here's this poor geek living in a world of convertibles zipping past him on the highways all the time, and he's never even ridden in one. It made me feel like King Farouk. I was tempted to have my attorney pull into the next airport and arrange some kind of simple, common-law contract whereby we could just give the car to this unfortun..
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
a5cef87
|
Security ... what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it another word for rut? Let us visualize the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial and personal security for his goal in life. In general, he is a man who has pushed ambition and init..
|
|
hunter-s-thompson
security
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
c4cda63
|
How many more nights and weird mornings can this terrible shit go on? How long can the body and the brain tolerate this doom-struck craziness? This grinding of teeth, this pouring of sweat, this pounding of blood in the temples... small blue veins gone amok in front of the ears, sixty and seventy hours with no sleep.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
5dc42fd
|
This is one of the hallmarks of Vegas hospitality. The only bedrock rule is Don't Burn the Locals. Beyond that, nobody cares. They would rather not know. If Charlie Manson checked into the Sahara tomorrow morning, nobody would hassle him as long as he tipped big.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
61656ee
|
Hey, honkies!" my attorney screamed. "Goddamnit, I'm serious! I want to sell you some pure fuckin' smack!"
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
7ca34e2
|
Consciousness Expansion" went out with LBJ ... and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon."
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
955789e
|
When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don't waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
fd8a0ff
|
I wondered if maybe this kind of thing happened all the time in Vegas -- cars full of late-arriving passengers screeching desperately across the runway, dropping off wild eyed Samoans clutching mysterious canvas bags who would sprint onto planes at the last possible second and then roar off into the sunrise.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
cbdb8b3
|
As for LSD, I highly recommend it. We had a fine, wild weekend and no trouble at all. The feeling it produces is hard to describe. 'Intensity' is a fair word for it. Try half a cube at first, just sit in the living room and turn on the music - after the kids have gone to bed. But never take it in uncomfortable or socially tense situations. And don't have anybody around whom you don't like.
|
|
lsd
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
5019371
|
The line between madness and masochism was already hazy;
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
65865b4
|
I suspect we could have done the whole thing on acid ... except for some of the people; there were faces and bodies in that group who would have been absolutely unendurable on acid.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
7edbf7f
|
I'm bound to go to heaven because I've already served my time in hell.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
dd347ea
|
If the thing bites down much harder I might wig out and demand beer... stay away from the phone, watch the red arrow... this typewriter is keeping me on my rails, without it I'd be completely adrift and weird.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
62827c8
|
Las Vegas is not the kind of town where you want to drive down Main Street aiming a black bazooka-looking instrument at people.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
7c9b745
|
Finally we came over a rise and I saw the Caribbean...My first feeling was a wild desire to drive a stake in the sand and claim the place for myself. The beach was white as salt, and cut off from the world by a ring of steep hills that faced the sea. We were on the edge of a large bay and the water was that clear, turquoise color that you get with a white sand bottom. I had never seen such a place. I wanted to take off all my clothes and ne..
|
|
peace
desire
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
f786d03
|
When you're asked to stay out of a bar you don't just punch the owner--you come back with your army and tear the place down, destroy the whole edifice and everything it stands for. No compromise. If a man gets wise, mash his face. If a woman snubs you, rape her. This is the thinking, if not the reality, behind the whole Hell's Angels act.
|
|
philosophy
retaliation
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
02162f3
|
Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn't handle the pressure.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
6c2dd24
|
There is a beautiful consistency about Buzzard; he is a porcupine among men, with his quills always flared. If he won a new car with a raffle ticket bought in his name by some momentary girlfriend, he would recognize it at once as a trick to con him out of a license fee. He would denounce the girl as a hired slut, beat up the raffle sponsor, and trade off the car for five hundred Seconals and a gold-handled cattle prod.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
6929937
|
I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel--white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
ce1da6f
|
Too weird to live, and too rare to die.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
7d8a0d2
|
The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
f4ef1f8
|
At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and a head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn...pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness...towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, and trying desperately to remember whi..
|
|
politics
werewolf
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
cb99e11
|
I have tonight begun reading a stupid, shitty book by Kerouac called , and I would give a ball to wake up tomorrow on some empty ridge with a herd of beatniks grazing in the clearing about 200 yards below the house. And then to squat with the big boomer and feel it on my shoulder with the smell of grease and powder and, later, a little blood.
|
|
criticism
big-sur
correspondence
kerouac
hunting
beatnik
letters
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
cca4123
|
Far from being freaks, the Hell's Angels are a logical product of the culture that now claims to be shocked at their existence. The generation represented by the editors of Time has lived so long in a world full of Celluloid outlaws hustling toothpaste and hair oil that it is no longer capable of confronting the real thing. For twenty years they have sat with their children and watched yesterday's outlaws raise hell with yesterday's world ...
|
|
outlaws
hollywood
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
33eaae5
|
One of the strangest things about these five downhill years of the Nixon presidency is that despite all the savage excesses committed by the people he chose to run the country, no real opposition or realistic alternative to Richard Nixon's cheap and mean-hearted view of the American Dream has ever developed. It is almost as if that sour 1968 election rang down the curtain on career politicians. This is the horror of American politics today ..
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
af9a9da
|
I like this book and I especially like the title. Only a fool or a whore would call it anything else.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
8797147
|
In a nation of frightened dullards there is a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome:
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
1ff01f0
|
Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99C/ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. "Say whatever you want, fella. They'll hear you, don't worry about that. Remember you'll be two hundred feet tall." Jesus Christ. I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly out the window, when suddenly a..
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
ab5bd62
|
Listening to him, I realized how long it had been since I'd felt like I had the world by the balls, how many quick birthdays had gone by since that first year in Europe when I was so ignorant and so confident that every splinter of luck made me feel like a roaring champion.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
79f260d
|
That gin-soaked little Nazi from the Gazette got pissed off when you didn't doff your hat for the national anthem," Burgin explained. "He kept bitching about you to the guy in charge of the press box, then he got that asshole who works for him all cranked up and they started talking about having you arrested." "Jesus creeping shit," I muttered. "Now I know why I got out of sportswriting."
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
a6a9126
|
It is Autumn, as you know, and things are beginning to die. It is so wonderful to be out in the crisp Fall air, with the leaves turning gold and the grass turning brown and the warmth going out of the sunlight and big hot fires in the fireplace while Buddy rakes the lawn. We see a lot of bombs on TV because we watch it a lot more, now that the days get shorter and shorter, and darkness comes so soon, and all the flowers die from freezing.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
3f9a706
|
It was dangerous lunacy, but it was also the kind of thing a real connoisseur of edge-work could make an argument for.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
2d7deed
|
I've spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives . . . No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenaline rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speedin..
|
|
fear-and-loathing
freak-power
gonzo-writing
hunter-s-thompson
us-presidential-politics
george-mcgovern
richard-nixon
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
b484428
|
If we start electing presidents on the basis of their sexual purity, some real monsters will get into the White House.
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
d6d35d9
|
The strategy worked like a charm, and in 1980 Jimmy Carter was swept away like offal by the "Reagan Revolution," which ushered in eight years of berserk looting of the federal treasury and the economic crippling of the middle class. That was the eighties, folks. That was the feeding frenzy of the New Rich, who found themselves wallowing in excess profits as their maximum income tax rate got chopped down to 31 percent and who were welcomed l..
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
|
6ff9aa4
|
Jesus, you know I was walking back to the huddle and I looked over and, god damn, I almost flipped when I saw you and Davis standing together on the sideline. I thought, man, the world really is changing when you see a thing like that--Hunter Thompson and Al Davis--Christ, you know that's the first time I ever saw anybody with Davis during practice; the bastard's always alone out there, just pacing back and forth like a goddamn beast. ...
|
|
|
Hunter S. Thompson |