On The 6th Day Of Christmas, HST's Ghost Gave To Me

.....A Carbuncle Under The Tree.....

   "I remember one Christmas morning in Manhattan when we got into the
Empire State Building and went up to the Executive Suite of some
famous underwear company and shoved a 600-pound red, tufted-leather
Imperial English couch out of a corner window on something like the
eighty-fifth floor....The wind caught it, as I recall, and it sort of
drifted around the corner onto Thirty-fourth Street, picking up speed
on its way down, and hit the striped awning of a Korean market, you
know, the kind that sells everything from kimchi to Christmas trees.
The impact blasted watermelons and oranges and tomatoes all over the
sidewalk. We could barely see the impact from where we were, but I
remember a lot of activity on the street when we came out of the
elevator.... It looked like a war zone. A few gawkers were standing
around in a blizzard, muttering to each other and looking dazed. They
thought it was an underground explosion -- maybe a subway or a gas
main.

  Just as we arrived on the scene, a speeding cab skidded on some
watermelons and slammed into a Fifth Avenue bus and burst into flames.
There was a lot of screaming and wailing of police sirens Two cops
began fighting with  a gang of looters who had emerged like ghosts out
of the snow and were running off with hams and turkeys and big jars of
caviar....Nobody seemed to think it was strange. What the hell? Shit
happens. Welcome to the Big Apple. Keep alert. Never ride in open cars
or walk to too close to a tall building when it snows ....There were
Christmas trees scattered all over the street and cars were stopping
to grab them and speeding away. We stole one and took it to Missy's
place on the Bowery, because we knew she didn't have one. But she
wasn't home, so we put the tree out on the fire escape and set it on
fire with kerosene. 

  That's how I remember New York, Jann. It was always a time of angst
and failure and turmoil. Nobody ever seemed to have any money on
Christmas. Even rich people were broke and jabbering frantically on
their telephones about Santa Claus and suicide or joining a church
with no rules....The snow was clean and pretty for the first twenty or
thirty minutes around dawn, but after that it was churned into filthy
mush by drunken cabbies and garbage compactors and shitting dogs.

  Anybody who acted happy on Christmas was lying -- even the ones who were
getting paid $500 an hour...."

Fear and Loathing in Elko, Hunter S. Thompson
Rolling Stone #622, January 23, 1992

This was actually Thompson's second screed that centered on a road trip to Elko (ie. not Las Vegas) Nevada.

And both were bought and paid for by Jann Wenner.

The first, in 1974, was full of hope and light and the Power of the Freak banging up hard against bigtime politics in The Age of Nixon.

Heckfire, back then the going was so good that Thompson even had Patrick J. Buchanan on his side.

Sort of.

The piece on the second trip to Elko, however, was in many ways the polar opposite of the first because it was totally devoid of hope. In fact, it was so over the top in its meaness and misanthropy that I rarely read it even though it is filled to bursting with many fine examples of Thompson's technical wizardry as a wordsmith.

And the excerpt above, which is little more than a digression at the end, is actually very mild compared to the extremely vile and ugly main vein of the thing.

So why am I bringing it up here, smack dab in the middle of the Twelve Days of Christmas, if I figure it means less than zero thematically?

Well, something happened today that made me realize that a good dose of colon-cleansing misanthropy is sometimes the only way to deal with these, the times of the new dumb.

****

It all began when the Internets told me that it was my duty to swallow my pride and head for Toy'sRUs, which is located on the old BowMac lot on Broadway.

I arrived on my bike in the dying light of a gloomy, mist-laden Vancouver afternoon in December.

The sidewalk was awash in beggars, people begging for cabs, glistening puddles filled with cigarette butts, and the stomach-churning scent of a Mr. Tube Steak stand.

But, if truth be told, the time actually spent within the bowels of the store itself wasn't so bad after all.

In fact, for the first 15 minutes or so I had a blast gawking at all the board games before I finally got down to brass tacks and found what I was looking for, an old-style blitzkrieg-boppish action figure thing that my brothers and I played with as kids, and will now be playing once again in six days or so.

Even a long wait in the check-out line was relatively pleasent as I chatted with a harried looking, but extremely nice, woman with a fully laden cart who told me that she has 4 kids under the age of ten. As a result, she trys her best to get 90% of her shopping done in one shot.

But all the niceties evaporated when I began to move through the funnel aisles that shot me towards the single exit door which was blocked by a woman dressed in what looked like a modern version of the shrink-wrap variations.

The woman was screeching at a cluster of 5 or 6 teenaged staff members who were doing their best to haul a huge box the size of two shower stalls out onto the sidewalk.

My first thought, as I lent them a hand getting the thing through the door was....

'I didn't know they sell fridges at Toys'RUs.'

But of course it was not a fridge, or even humungous version of that old standby, the Easy-Bake Oven.

Instead, it was a motorized, to-scale, full-metal jacket version of a Cadillac Escalade.

And the vehicle the kids shoved it into was a full-sized version of the real thing.

As I backed away from the scene a bum emerged from the shadows to ask for spare change.

Shrink-wrap woman attempted to curl her lips in disgust, but the whiff of the botulinum left her face frozen half-way between a smile and a leer as she turned away without acknowledging either the bum or the young kids that had just slid the hunk of mini-metal into her giant-sized hunk of metal and fetishized chrome.

And suddenly I realized that maybe, just maybe, the good Docktor's prescribed medicine to stave off the worst of the madness of our waygone world was not all flim-flam and quackery after all.

OK?


_____
The image at the top depicts the final launching of Thompson's ashes into the strat-o-matic-o-sphere.


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