If you haven't already detected my love for the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thompson is a god) - note the subtitle of this blog - you should know that reading it this past December changed my life. Not kidding. Vacationing in Florida with my family over christmas, I needed a little something to escape to. Thought it might as well be the story of two middle aged "journalists" on a drug rampage across Las Vegas. The music references are also incredibly great. I'm not someone who usually freaks out over a passage in a book, but when I read the one below I had to reread it a good seven hundred times to fully figure it out. Thompson does an insane job of getting across what life was like in the sixties (truly a genius way of putting it). The random looking bits in a larger font are the parts that really hit me. If this is what it was really like...hell. Somebody better invent a goddamn time machine during my lifetime.
"My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights - or very early mornings - whenI left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hor wearing L.L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket...booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always staling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change)...but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that...
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. I not accross the Bay, then up the Golde Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda...you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
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 in fighting - or side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave..."
- Hunter S. Thompson
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