26/02/05
22/02/05
Twenty-nine years old, and it takes another man's much-publicized death for me to stumble across the fact that we shared a birthday. Until now, the only celebrity whose birthday I'd knowingly shared was Bill freakin' Cosby. Fuck that guy and his fucking pudding pops. Freeman's pizza? Hunter S. woulda spat that inedible shit out and groped some ass before somehow beguiling his way up onto the ugly neon VD tower-thing to piss all over some college wanks having a smoke outside in anticipation of semi-ironically scoring him some coke.
Which kinda leads me to this: fuck the cult of Hunter Thompson, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, fuck Hunter Thompson. If this had happened ten years ago I'd have been freaking out the way I was supposed to over Kurt Cobain, but now... I dunno. The man's life saddened me (that is, the pseudo-mature "me" that's writing this here thing) in a way that I'm not prepared to put into words, and I wish I could go back in time and put a copy of, I dunno, Cat's Cradle or something in little teenage Eben's hands in place of ...Las Vegas. Switch it up so I'd read Vonnegut when I was impressionable, and Hunter S. once I was jaded.
But whatever. I'm cringing a little at this comparison, but it is true in my case, so here it is: for better or for worse, the guy inspired me to write, and was my first school in the legitimacy of the unconventional, in much the same way that Kurt Cobain showed me (and a bazillion other people that seem to have not gotten quite the same thing out of it) that nobody needs to know the mixolydian scale backwards and forwards to write a decent song. Convention needs itself because it's rarely memorable on its own merits.
Hunter Thompson lived a life so wholly self-absorbed and devoid of simple sincerity that I can only think of him as a charlatain now. But I'm glad that someone played that game so aptly and for so long, and I'm glad it was him. He was about my age when he started his act.
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Which kinda leads me to this: fuck the cult of Hunter Thompson, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, fuck Hunter Thompson. If this had happened ten years ago I'd have been freaking out the way I was supposed to over Kurt Cobain, but now... I dunno. The man's life saddened me (that is, the pseudo-mature "me" that's writing this here thing) in a way that I'm not prepared to put into words, and I wish I could go back in time and put a copy of, I dunno, Cat's Cradle or something in little teenage Eben's hands in place of ...Las Vegas. Switch it up so I'd read Vonnegut when I was impressionable, and Hunter S. once I was jaded.
But whatever. I'm cringing a little at this comparison, but it is true in my case, so here it is: for better or for worse, the guy inspired me to write, and was my first school in the legitimacy of the unconventional, in much the same way that Kurt Cobain showed me (and a bazillion other people that seem to have not gotten quite the same thing out of it) that nobody needs to know the mixolydian scale backwards and forwards to write a decent song. Convention needs itself because it's rarely memorable on its own merits.
Hunter Thompson lived a life so wholly self-absorbed and devoid of simple sincerity that I can only think of him as a charlatain now. But I'm glad that someone played that game so aptly and for so long, and I'm glad it was him. He was about my age when he started his act.
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18/02/05
04/02/05
"Music is a bigger deal than most other things. If you show a painting to a dog, it doesn't mean anything to him. Play him a flute and his head turns."
-Bob Wiseman
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-Bob Wiseman
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