Dusting Off
Goodmorning (yes, it’s after noon). I just woke up from deep peaceful sleep filled with the strangest dreams I don’t even remember. Last night, after drinking Andrew’s pot of coffee, I was up ‘till 3am finishing some essays about Oscar Wilde. But before I could start, I found the NEED to clean and dust every corner of the kitchen (procrastination? Nah). I woke up to sparkling nick- nacks and clean counters. Even Hunter’s reading glasses are shining.
Anyway, the weekend was great after recovering from the attacks on Hunter. Jerri Merritt, a good friend, who is a famous criminal defense attorney along with being one of the top bloggers in the country, wrote a beautiful entry defending Hunter from the attacks of wanna-be writers/reviews re: Jann Wenner’s ugly book about Hunter. She stayed at Owl Farm, in her favorite room overlooking the cottonwood trees in the front yard and the white peaks of the Rockies. She drove back to Denver on Monday under blue Colorado skies in her Jeep cherokee to finish her outline for a lecture in Key West for NORML.
And to you: Thank you so much for your lovely emails of support re: the dust up over Jann’s book. Hunter does indeed have an army of supporters and I’m not worried anymore about stupid attacks on his character. Stacey McCain also defended us, (and is the one who called Jerri to give her the heads up) along with other thoughtful writers around the country. (with many more bloggers doing the same). History will be the judge of both Hunter and Jann, so I’m not worried.
My dreams were pretty intense last night, I vaguely remember one of them having to do with the concept of heaven, and another having to do with dusty reading glasses and walking around at night — Very strange. So I woke up thinking about a great piece Hunter wrote in 1988 for Generation of Swine, lamenting the shame and degradation of the 80s, just as Hunter laments the loss of the American Century in Hey Rube. In this piece, he describes what Heaven and Hell would be like. THIS is what he said about Heaven:
Heaven is a bit harder to figure, and there are some things that not even a smart boy can tell you for sure…But I can guess. Or wonder. Or maybe just think like a gambler or a fool or some kind of atavistic rock & roll lunatic and make it about 8-1 that Heaven will be a place where the swine will be sorted out at the gate and sent off like rats with huge welts and lumps and puncture wounds all over their bodies – Down the long black chute where ugliness rolls over you every 10 or 16 minutes likes waves of boiling asphalt and poison scum, followed by sergeants and lawyers and crooked cops waving rule books; And where nobody laughs and everybody lies and the days drag by like dead animals and the nights are full of whores and junkies clawing at your windows and tax men jamming writs under your door and the screams of the doomed coming up through the air shaft along with white cockroaches and red stringworms full of AIDS and bursts of foul gas with no sunrise and the morning streets full of preachers begging for money and fondling themselves with gangs of fat young boys trailing after them… Ah…But we were talking about Heaven…or trying to…but somehow we got back into Hell.
–Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine, 1988
Until next time, your friend, sitting in a sparkling kitchen looking out the window to blue skies,
Anita Thompson
