"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

[fiefoe]

It seemed important that I should read some Hunter S. Thompson, but I no longer know why. I don't like reading about or watching dream sequences, let alone hallucinations, but his ability to write them down so lucidly is still astounding.

• The only way to prepare for a trip like this, I felt, was to dress up like human peacocks and get crazy, then screech off across the desert and cover the story. Never lose sight of the primary responsibility.
• But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas.
• Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.
• "I'd like to get hold of some priests' robes," I said. "They might come in handy in Las Vegas."
• How often does a chance like that come around? To jangle the bastards right down to the core of their spleens. Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.
• But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country – but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.
• The woman shrugged as he led me away. In a town full of bedrock crazies, nobody even notices an acid freak.
• "There's a big ... machine in the sky, ... some kind of electric snake ... coming straight at us." <> "Shoot it," said my attorney.  <> "Not yet," I said. "I want to study its habits."
• The frog-eyed woman clawed feverishly at his belt. "Stand up!" she pleaded. "Please stand up! You'd be a very handsome man if you'd just stand up!"
• Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino.


• Would he dare to suck a sleeve?
• but there was no avoiding the stench of twisted humor that hovered around the idea of a gonzo journalist in the grip of a potentially terminal drug episode being invited to cover the National District Attorneys' Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.