Go Figure
Sunday. “A vision of your dead grandmother climbing up your leg with a knife in her teeth....” I am watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on tape, as it happens, having replaced my dead VHS player with a new one a couple of months back. I don't remember that line from The Book, but that just means it's time to re-read The Book. I don't have many VHS tapes or DVD's. I see a movie, even a great movie, and I usually don't have an urge to own it or watch it again with the exception of some few such as Fear and Loathing and, say, Performance, the first movie I ever bought. I recall I paid $50 for it way back when one paid $50 for a VHS flick and I didn't really have $50 to spend on a movie. Life in the fast lane, even then.
This is a digression, of course, this Fear and Loathing business. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a 60's myth, perhaps the 60's myth, written by a man who, in the end, was blown out of the mouth of a cannon. Nothing against myths, they're usually much nicer than the reality they're describing, remembering those times with both edgyness and fondness. That was a long time ago when I was someone else living in different dream on another planet. I did have drinks and dinner with MRH last night, by the way, in San Francisco. An old friend, as I mentioned, from both grade school and high school. We had a good time, never missing a beat, skipping a gap of something like forty-five years as if it had never existed.
Sunday evening now, reminiscing, coming down from the weekend, the day almost over, the evening still ahead: time to reflect, time to have a drink and listen to old rock and roll or watch a movie. Even the photograph up top brings back memories of another time. All the mistakes that were made in Vietnam, all of those analyses done after (“we'll never be this dumb again”) and now we're right in the middle of another one. Fifty thousand dead in Vietnam to get our attention and now forty years later, most of us still around to remember, and we evidently didn't learn lesson one. But if I continue with this I will turn maudlin and I am not in the mood for maudlin. Plenty of time for that later.
Still, not a bad day. A few hours at the office this morning continuing to wrestle with the project I've been wrestling now for too long. I would have spent more time to screw it up even better, but there's only so much time we're allotted in this world and I was not in the mood to spend it in front of a computer at the office. Better to spend it in front of a computer here at the apartment.
That makes sense?
Go figure.
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