Begining ear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

Wrote this about two weeks ago while reading... well it's in the title ;)

I am sitting here nursing a midnight hangover (don’t ask), trying reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Ah, what a world it must have been to be back there in that age and writing for Rolling Stone magazine! If only these things were possible now a days. It is partly publishing’s fault, though the blame is constantly shifted to ‘the Reading public’. Yet as an unorthodox social scientist in training I can safely say ‘that just ain’t so’.

A word before I start the ritual massacre of modern customs and conventions. We had an interesting discussion at the last Bangkok Writer’s Guild meetup about editors, after the official meeting of course and everyone had had enough wine and food, those that had better places to go went, and those that could stay were really getting into the bare knuckle parts of being a working writer.

We’d somehow gotten onto the topic of Raymond Carver and his editor (his name), and how that heavily influenced his style. I remember window reading up the only copy (no, no I will not blame the reading public) of at the biggest, most modern bookstore which shall remained unnamed (because I refuse to name drop them), at the swankest department store in the capital (I was awaiting a FREE emerging female Japanese directors film festival; now if that doesn’t give it away, then you don’t know our lovely capital. NOTE: Awesome indie films, but the theater location still made me feel guilty) finding that the later stories didn’t seem like the Carver I studied in school. I could think of about a good dozen examples of such editor/mentor figures in the memoirs of great writers, a list which included the likes of Thompson, and Hemingway.
“These days, it’s just not the same,” our guest speaker said, in that pleasant American drawl I associate with being born a generation before my time. “These days’ editors just want to sell what you give them. They’re not interesting in mentoring the young writer anymore.”
“If you look at his earlier work, as compared to his later, even the meaning’s changed.” Phillip said.

“You know, you could try writing a story about that. About trying to find such an editor or agent.”

“Good idea,” I said. “As an idealist young writer fresh outta college I want to develop fast, and I know I’m going to need someone like that if I’m going to get to my goal at the end of the year.”

Very good idea. I thought. Very good idea. I want to learn to not only express myself, but do it good.

“Like in the music industry,” another member said, “you develop talent.”

Catching a cab home (protesters had just bombed the subway that night, so I figured I could justifiably afford a bit for safety) I then thought of those other group of writers though that had their peers acting as mentor and editors, like the Beats, the mud raking Socialists, the post-war Paris Americans, and the even the Auteur in film. Perhaps as a young writer attempting to find the voice to bend into control chaos (your controlled chaos) on that empty canvas, it might not be such a good idea. Hemmingway might bully Fitzgerald into tips about writing, but I bet he would’ve have gotten so insane and great without Zelda, nor Henry Miller without June or Anais. Perhaps where I’m going I can’t ask for traditional mentors, not from the writing world, nor from the ideals of an anti-heroic society. Perhaps where I’m going I need more than just words, thoughts, egotistical rationality, and my dulled senses. In trying to light my own fire I can’t keep looking off at distant flames across mountains for guidance. I’m on a strange mountain of my own shrouded in darkness and immense beauty. Unexplored wonder. Like a pioneer, like an impotent caveman, I’m peering into the mist not knowing what will come next. The voices in my head, my mentor and muse, can only extract me from the mundane into this reality but they cannot help with the exploration. They can help keep me strong, but they can’t learn my dream, nor learn my song for me.

Like an act of faith, I’m stumbling blind into rapture.

Long interlude aside; it’s pleasant to read a mind attempting at grasping something. The author’s note about jettisoning hindsight is a rare gem amongst books written about a subject. Why must people constantly want that 50/50 look at things? Historicism will kill, it has killed. The very notion of comparing past events to predict the future is as good as driving an oil tanker with the rear view mirror that instead of reflecting, is painted of a congealed consensus of all the passengers on board. And people wonder when it hits an iceberg, or runs aground on a reef!

To quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb, ‘We don’t learn that we don’t learn.”

Getting that blow-by-blow account of attempting to understand an event is a better example, perhaps the only true account of what’s actually going on. After years of college I’m tired of arguments, and studying politics, I’m especially tired of arguments over nothing, about nothing, or doing nothing definable. I’m convinced that there are enough experts and talking heads on TV to drive pharmaceutical sales that I’d be quickly out of job if I’d even wanted to join the peanut gallery. They can make a rat-race about anything thanks to those damn people who clap at the wrong moments (refer to Catcher in the Rye, pg. 84), if you know what I mean.
I’m more interested about how one gets the story, and what that speaks about the process. Anyone and everyone with a little bit of fame in the social sciences have written a book whose title could have all been switched to: ‘Where we went wrong’. We’re endlessly discussing problems, and possible solutions, and the problems with those solutions. Meanwhile, actors influence global politics, incompetent politicians are allowed to continue to mumble through their ‘political careers’ while bankrupting countries, and a new generation of young people become zombiefied, raterized, and chop sues and stir fried rice to feed the pigs. The really, really fat pigs.
Side-note: I don’t know why, but CEOs always look like they want to eat you smiling in front of their corporate logos.

And unlike people who speak at air-conditioned, climate change conferences in suits, I’ve neither solutions nor facts to awe nor scare. I’ve got no call to action, and in fact I’m not acting at the moment because I have no life. I don’t know what life is. I do know that it’s not a knowledge problem, though. I don’t know where we went wrong, nor do I particularly care at this point. I don’t even know where we’re going, or where we came from. In a society that denies first-hand experience of self-knowledge, but increasingly manufactures and sells second-hand experiences of it, I’m content to be a little man living under a rock right now to figure out certain things. I’m contended to represent the disunited republic of myself, but I wonder… Am I a toad, or a frog? Are my hallucinations revealing, or are they concealing (please don’t tell me they’re not real; everyone hallucinates, everyday. Read a Zen story.) what I want to know? What do I want to know? Aren’t they just as valid as blue or red for spring fashion? Some wouldn’t like to think so.

Whatever solutions I’ll come up with, I can guarantee this: it won’t be rational. I’m traveling a different path. If like Don Juan reflects, all paths ultimately lead to death, I’m just hoping this path I’m a walking has a heart.

Ah… what is heart?