My sister phoned me at eight in the morning today. Maybe a little before, maybe a little after. The voice was a little hyper – a little cracked – the markers of upset.

She said my name; Twice. I think.

I’m not sure why.

Maybe it was just to make sure she’d woken me up properly.

“Yeah I’m here. What is it?”

“Hunter S. Thompson is dead.”

The rest of the information sluiced out quick in the one side of upset and the other of half awake just woken reality. When it was over, I stumbled back to bed to fall in a strange dream warp doze which consisted largely of snippets from his letters – words and responses mottled with segments from ‘Where the Buffalo roam’

”Sir. Sir. Sir! You can’t go in there!”

“I’m the president of the United States of America…I can go anywhere I want…”

I had work in twenty, thirty minutes. I could have stayed awake – but I needed whatever moments of sleep I could get – I could have saved myself the day twisting slew of sound and images – but – once back in bed – there was no going back.

It is – only right that it was the sister who phoned me. As it was her who first introduced me to Thompson. I was ten and a half (the half matters when you’re ten) or eleven at the time. The versions of the story don’t matter – it’s enough to say she left me with ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’.

I think now – looking back on things – that maybe giving me such a book at such a young age maybe wasn’t the best thing to do. Impressions…and all that. She denies this ever happened, hotly, of course. And of course, this denial slides into conspiratorial chuckling with just the edge of a cackle if she’s had a few and maybe a smoke.

You might say it would have changed nothing for a child whose heroes were Dennis Hopper, Oliver Reed and a litany of other hell raisers. I suppose you’d be right. Perhaps ‘Fuel Injected Dreams’ had more of an impact.

Regardless.

The words;

“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.”

Would be indelibly seared into my brain - And a fascination with acid was also sown - This would much later prove to be my repeated down fall.

Moderation has never been my thing – it has to be done to it’s depths with intensity. A long drive past the point of recreation and a small hill walk beyond the point of pleasure. It’s not searching. But it’s probably something.

Take it. Grab it. Bite it. Use it till it or you are a blackened husk – then throw it away – bored…spent…

The motto of my teenage naivety was; “Ravaged; Decadence for the millennium.”

It reminds me of those casual hipsters around the ‘net who quote; ”He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

And attribute it to Thompson. Little knowing in fact it was Dr. Samuel Johnson. As it says in Thompson’s book, as it says in Johnson’s book. How many pseudo-intellectual – “I’ve read Strindberg and I carry around a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra” fuckheads did I argue that point with – only to have them still walk away telling me it was Thompson

Apt now – I suppose.

Gone the way of Hemingway.

Too mean to grow old. Too smart to reach the adult diapers nurse Ratched wiping your ass years.

Where were you – when you heard? Heard what? Moon landing? Kennedy?

No…

Thompson.

I remember when I heard Richard Harris died. Do you?

I was asleep with my then girlfriend – we couldn’t find an apartment at the time so were living at my mother’s.

My mother came in, softly, on the way to somewhere, to wake me up, with a bundle of newspaper, to softly say to the sleep sodden blare;

“Richard Harris is dead.”

“Are you ok? I made some coffee…theres some beer in the fridge.”

I remember when I heard Oliver Reed died. Do you?

I was working on something when the news hit – my sister was flicking through the channels as I heard; “Oliver Reed has died…”

Both my mother and I roared at her to go back - We needn’t have – she already was.

I think it was the next day, maybe a day after, maybe two days after. I remember little – I just know it was a weekend.

When they did the Oliver Reed homage / night / remembrance on television.

I spent what little money I had on (approximately); Forty Benson and Hedges, 2 cigars. Twenty eight…there abouts, large liter an’a bit bottles of cobra beer (it could have been tiger)...and a nagin of whiskey…

I lined them up on my windowsill to keep them cold and sat with my then girlfriend (same one as before) as I watched it all roll by.

Maudlin…

She couldn’t understand my head space. She didn’t know who he was and she damn well couldn’t understand why I was so upset.

Now it’s 2005…

Several girl friends later…

I remember when I heard Hunter S. Thompson died. Do you?

I was lying beside my girlfriend…when the phone rang…

I had to go to work that day – I couldn’t grieve until later. I spent the day repeating;

”I can’t believe he’s dead…”

”Shit happens”…my employer would repeat…

It’s not so much a Kennedy thing where I’m standing there – hands on cheeks – mumbling to myself – blubbering some shit about one side or the other winning…

It’s more a…

Fuck

Fuck…

Fuck.

There aren’t many of them left now.

Many good voices. “…wheres that medicine?”

“Oh, the medicine, yeah, it’s right here…”

To quote Ulver; We’re increasingly left with voices that talk and talk…towards…nothing.

Recently, Kevin Myers was allowed publish an article for the times wherein in reference to Single Mothers (MOBS he called them – Mothers of Bastards) he resorted to use the sort of Christianised far right rhetoric that forced several of my friends to drag me kicking and shouting away from those brain washed idiots who stand with placards baring the pictures of aborted fetuses.

I will be typing the article and it’s back handed apology up in due time. I will probably put them up here.

Claiming “Mobs” had it easy…made being a single mother an industry…moving basically to decry their bloated parasitic existence on the state as the cause of many of the state’s problems…and from that to say how easy they have it and that moves should be made to make it harder for them…

I know single parent families.

Through little to no fault of their own.

Many due to feckless drug addled wastes of fathers who are not even men enough to support their children…

Or are otherwise indifferent to the fact that another far smaller human being relies on them, at least, in part.

They do not even support their children whilst sending legal threats demanding half to full custody.

No money ever given – bar the sporadic twenty punt for nappies they deemed saintly enough to throw the mother’s way.

Nor will any thanks or money or support be given, as periodically the mothers will swallow everything back in an effort to ensure their child has and knows their father. Men as likely to cancel Christmas as they are to cancel that meeting on Saturday. A small child left waiting, waiting, all day sat in the living room, sometimes, staring out the window.

This reality Kevin Myers writes of. This reality he must exist in, where I do not.

Where single mothers have it easy.

I’d like to live there.

It is, I suppose; The same reality where if you’re a woman and you’ve been raped – a police officer is within his rights to ask you if you had an orgasm – and if you did – it’s not rape. (This happened to Patricia Cornwell) Either way, Lady, you probably deserved it.

It is, I imagine; A similar reality where women don’t drink pints – theres actually jobs for everybody (if you look hard enough, obviously if you don’t have a job – you’re not looking hard enough.) And every unemployed person is actually a by the numbers percentile cause of the rise in crime.

No.

The voices are few and far between.

Gone is the verbal and written fist.

It is replaced now by thin-skinned liberals who are too nice for their own good. Patting each other on the back, masturbating each other’s ego at every given chance and tiptoeing about in a manner that is almost ninja like in how it pretends to be hard core…but…like a tootsie pop…is nothing but useless chemical goo at the centre.

Yes. Wolfe is there. But now he quietly rails against the only thing he can…the upper crust…artisan layer cake of New York society that is;

“if Bush gets elected I’m leaving the country.”

Wolfe’s response;

“Yes please leave, I’ll buy you a ticket.”

Nice dancing from the man who wrote the ‘The Pump House gang’ and ‘The electric kool-aid acid test’.

But in the clamor of nothing – something is often lost.

Voices, voices.

I understand the need for both sides. Let each have its say and hope the numbers have the wit and intelligence to see the centre.

I can understand why pundits came out to applaud Myers’ piece as a prime example of free speech.

Just as I can understand the people who are issuing death threats.

While I accept the need to see life through the malformed perception of a middle to upper journalist with a superiority complex.

I also readily agree that he and his ilk need to be excised like the bloated cancers they are.

Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not advocating murder, should any one get the thought.

Instead.

I’m advocating wholesale slaughter.

Lets call it teaching by example.

We could root out the ones with such pig faced opinions – and show them just what the other side goes through. How this industry of single mothers really works, how well they’ve got it.

If they – after such re-education can still jam their porcine little eyes up and insist these women do it for the money, perks and benefits…

Then.

And only then.

Should we remove them.

I know I am playing on the extreme here… But, it is a card I like to play as those pundits with the public’s ear have no qualms in sitting there, possibly in their holiday home in Galway or Cork, tap-tapping up a poorly researched article which breaths a hateful extreme to the point where they get to use bigoted language such as MOBS.

Let they who start the fires – for once – feel the heat.

It’s like the right wing blogger who is partly responsible for Eason Jordan resigning.

There is a reason journalism is a profession.

If you do not understand the meaning of Chatham House Rules.

Then don’t deem to mount your little crusade to right the wrongs you perceive the limp wristed left as perpetrating and pushing.

“…Turn up that fucking music – my heart feels like an alligator - Volume! Clarity! Bass! We must have bass. What is wrong with us? Are we goddamn old ladies”

I’d like to have celebrated Thompson’s exit with my weight in rum and a half-ounce of pure speed. But. My days of speed – access to or otherwise are behind me for the time being…and I just can’t afford the rum…

So it’s a skulled bottle of red wine, some cigarettes and worn out cigar I was saving for a rainy day.

Hm…

I think I’m coming down.

Finally.

It’s been a few years.

There is now. No writer living that; if on the blue moon gypsy’s kiss of a chance I get published – that I’d actually like to have known read my stuff. I didn’t want validation or praise, actually scorn would have worked best I think – it would have at least made things interesting.

It’s more simple; I just wanted to say thanks.

It’s a funny word. Funnier still if you say it to someone in the public eye.

I have a habit of just, running into famous people – literally – running into them, oblivious until I have to apologise or pick them up off the floor.

So thanks has become the word.

Generally; you’re met with bewilderment.

Prachett understood me when I ran into him.

I think he’s been there, if I remember right, it was something about Tolkein.

John Hurt and all the others – didn’t seem to get it. Didn’t want to hassle them. Didn’t want an autograph or any sycophancy. A simple thanks. And I’ll be moving on.

It’s the least you can do when serendipity finds you.

Maudlin thought for the wishy-washies and the Goths – I suppose it’s a case of; in a world without heroes – you have to create your own.

And when you run out of them.

It’s worth a moment.

Because the options are; Soldier on.

Or join a support group.

Problem is, you can find yourself in a support group without knowing it – they hide now, like some sort of social entity that has mutated into a flesh eating stick insect skin changing lizard.

They exist now for every crawl of life. BDSM, gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, shoe fetishist, house wives, book lovers, pretty women, ugly women, fat women, fat men, fat lovers, animal lovers, cake bakers, flower pressers.

If I find one more social ladder entity where polys are limping husbands and wives battered by the mistake of saying yes to a partner who wants cake + eating rights, through dealing with their life now, as primary or secondary – I may just dissolve into pure fucking armageddon.

One more time – I happen across a supposed feminist (Feminism, if I remember right, being a movement for equality, not animal farm everyone is equal its just some are more equal than others) group or live journal – where a woman is saying something a long the lines of -

“if men had periods they’d have competitions about who had the worst period.”

No.

If men had periods.

They wouldn’t talk about it.

You want proof?

Breast Cancer.

I go by a big clinic with BREAST CHECK CLINIC written on it, every other day – I never see, Prostate Clinic

No. Men wouldn’t have competitions, because men don’t talk about those sort of things, which shows what juvenility exists and is fanned in women right up until their forties.

I tire of the conversations where we’re likened to kids…dogs…and a host of other lowering entities.

Indeed.

Sisters, are doing it for themselves.

It’s like a clique in the schoolyard.

Oh…

Don’t mind them…

They’ve got cooties… They smell…

And anyway;

They’re stupid.

patpat

It’s gone beyond the simple balance of it all -

Now - Now it’s about the childish repetition.

”Look over there…two women fucking a polar bear…”

Out of smokes now…out of wine – still painfully sober. Not the mock-sober of the kind where you sway back and forth repeating how fine you are – but the kind where reality still has it’s edges. The stricter kind of science where flash backs can still have you jumping up to catch the table thats folding in on itself about to crush your glasses – until you find yourself, coughing embarrassedly at you’re friends, mumbling; “Eh, I thought it was falling over.”

Down – parallel to the drunken point where you can almost smell the memory of a ten or eleven year old kid and the disappointment and sorrow you would have felt had you been told;

Bang

Gunshot wound to the head

gone

And maybe, you’re dwelling on it, is less in respect of anything your soulless cynicism can project, but moreso, because it’s what the ten year old would have said, done.

He said; “Uppers have gone out of style.”

Now its the time of jelly fleshed downers and chemicals that engender a false sense of brotherhood and love…

Now we take drugs just to be able to pretend we can open up, love, get down and dance. No reality to it, blessedly short – with the final ability to eventually come down and settle back into the knowledge that you didn’t really like them you only hugged them because you were pilling.

Somewhere out of this Blackshadow gibberish I realise that most of the up and coming voices I knew when I was younger, those few friends of mine who had anything and those others I just knew who could have done something – but didn’t, the voice, the fist, lost swallowed as they scuttle back away from reality into the safe haven of false emotion narcotics and even falser social circles.

As I watch the last few being washed away with the tide.

It leaves me envisioning a nightmare future utopia where vapidity has succeeded and society has now become the worm Oroboros – a never ending circle of people patting themselves and their “friends” on the back.

Where the last handful of real voices; a paltry amount that reminds of you all the times you got a really bad gram under the auspices of a sweet deal – are gone.

Where the real voices – now – are those with agendas, either their own crusade to push some sort of dogma or the agendas of their masters and employers. Afraid to speak their mind because they’ll either lose their job or have to face up to the grim truth that they just don’t have their own mind. Revisionists and all the ilk I’ve wandered to spitting distance within this.

And then I stop.

And realise;

Almost all the voices are gone.

And that nightmare – like an easy come down, where reality gently shrugs her shoulders and rights everything – the melting walls, the breathing colour filled crawl space – and things gain definition.

That, that nightmare, in it’s slow period of gaining definition,

is now.

A man dead, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

Hunter S. Thompson 1937 – 2005

”My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration or alternatively of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse” - A.Huxley