Mentalechoes

I’ve just finished watching a teevee show on the life and works of Hunter S. Thompson, one of the great contemporary writers of his time. I’ve always been fascinated by Hunter S ever since dirty Pete loaned me a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when we were living in share house called the Milton Hilton back in Brisbane. It was like no other book I had ever read and it had a profound affect on my sense of culture and literature from that time forward. In fact my Amsterdamage reality blog cum online book-by-chapters is massively influenced by this man and this book. (To be released in a matter of days now - though I know you might find it hard to believe).

I always imagined that Hunter S was a guy that lived life in a contentious way, never compromising his freedoms for the sake of conformity. In fact one of the things they said about Hunter on the teevee was that he exercised his freedoms; freedom of speech; freedom to drink; freedom travel and do what you want, much more than the ordinary citizens around him. But in fact, a lot of what he did was as much for show to keep up the public image he had created over the years, as it was his every day persona. That came as a real surprise to me because I never would have expected that someone who was an anarchist would play up to the media for self-aggrandizement. That was also the way it was for drugs and alcohol for him too. Back in his early days he genius was undeniable, the bender days and nights he would have gave him the canvas on which he would write his most powerful stories. But later in life, the guy would deliberately get loaded just to try to write stuff that would measure up to these. The more he did this though, the less relevant his work became until at the end of his life, he wasn’t doing anything of any relevance at all. And then at 67 he shot himself and brought an end to it all. By then he was more or less crippled and his mind was going from the 40 years of daily abuse.

It made think really about my own writing, and how sometimes I would drink when I was at the keyboard to try to get in the writing mood and get hugely creative. It’s one of those things that you do thinking that if you’re loosened up a bit, the ideas and words will flow easier. Hell, Bukowski used to drink a 5th of bourbon each night he wrote and pound out 10 pages of novel. As romantic as it sounds, there is a price to be paid for living like this. Their minds and bodies broke down towards the end, and they ended up losing the edge and not being able to write at all. That’s the shame of it all, to loose the very thing that gives your life meaning. Hunter S was a tortured soul, who never learned or wanted to control his darker side. I couldn’t help but see the irony in this as the narrator told told a story that would also describe a recurring theme going on in my life right now, so this small parable was particularly poignant.

And so after the show finished I was left with a feeling that there are choices we creative types need to make in the pursuit of the great masterpeice that lurks inside of us, waiting to be given life on a page. You can either turn yourself over to your obsession and burn yourself up in the fire as a sacrifice, or you can keep a check on that intensity and see yourself go the distance. Admitedly to do the later may mean you won’t hit the same peak, but you will actually get to keep going longer.

In the end, it’s all about choices!

Padwanna!