I started the day by glancing through a few feeds in Bloglines and there I
learned about Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide, which so many others have taken up
in entries today.  These
two
pages sat open in separate Firefox tabs all day, tucked behind other more
active tabs, although today has been, by and large, rather quiet in terms of
blogging, blog-reading.  I’m writing an essay for a class tomorrow morning,
and it has been a drudge working through saying saying saying stuff that reads
as careful, polished and seamless.  And I walked (a rather deep-snow
high-knee march across the park) to campus for a 670 (teacher-practicum)
meeting.  But that essay has tied me up.

I haven’t even read the articles about Hunter S., and I haven’t been moved to
dig into the entries posted by others.  It’s an effect of other presiding
forces that such an event hasn’t really drawn more than a few minutes of my
attention.  Family in town.  And that essay.

I didn’t know what I’d blog tonight, or even if I’d have time.  Still
need to scrape smooth the many rough edges of the essay, an essay yet in need of
expanding by another paragraph or two (especially brilliant ones, the sort that
rescue us from textual disasters, if possible).  I just printed a copy in
the office, and when I went to grab it from the printer, instead I took Fear
and Loathing from the shelf, flipped through it quickly to see whether I’d
left any notes or paper scraps in there when I last read it, maybe three years
ago.  Just one page is dog-eared; a folded sticky note book-marks another
page.  Hmm.  And I returned to crank out this entry (over the noise of
Ph. and T. playing silly chess, UConn vs. Notre Dame on the tube, and a match of
bickering wits between J. and three-year-old T.) without even thinking to grab
the draft of that disappointing essay from the printer.  It’s still there,
ink drying.

So it’s enough, for today, to post the two paragraphs I think I must have
been flagging with the bent page a few years ago.  They’re sufficiently
panegyric, insufficiently funereal:

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 run…but no explanation, no mix of words
or music or memories can touch the sense of knowing that you were there and
alive in that corner of time and the world.  Whatever it meant…

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit,
but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think
that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a
long find flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time–and
which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. (67)