Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas : A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

A book by HunterStocktonThompson, illustrated (at least in one version) by RalphSteadman. Also a movie by TerryGilliam (BrazilTheMovie, MontyPython) with JohnnyDepp? in the role of Hunter.

ISBN 0679785892

Absolutely great the way Hunter smokes cigarettes all the time. He shouldn't be ashamed of himself! -- PCP

Huh? I don't think he is at all able to be ashamed. If you are referring to HST, that is. -- OleAndersen

Are you making some kind of joke? Like how he smokes cigarettes compared to all the drugs he takes? -- rad

Or the fact that he drives a car? -- np

Some of those drugs are statistically harmless. But none of them affect innocent bystanders. (Unless he's also driving ;)

It appears that driving is one of the less dangerous activities of HSTs. -- OleAndersen

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This is one of my favorite passages from Fear and Loathing:

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seemed like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era - the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time - and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights - or very early mornings - when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L.L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got through the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change)... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that...

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...

And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

I also love the one about the 'fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip' and the 'desperate assumption that someone, somewhere is tending the light at the end of the tunnel'. (Not too sure if this is an exact quote, my copy of Fear and Loathing is on loan) -- BillKelly

"La Honda"? Shouldn't that be "La Juanda"? -- PCP I don't think so; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Honda

• Correct. La Honda is a stone's throw from Silicon Valley, and even though tiny, and in the middle of nowhere, is well known simply because one sees the name if one takes the scenic drive to the coast, if nothing else. "Los Altos" is a rather upscale town (which stretches to include rural parts of the coastal mountain, and was nothing but a rural town back in the 1960s) in Silicon Valley proper which contains many, many Spanish names (see the history of California to see why).

I loved it when he over-inflated the tires explaining to the gas station attendant that they were experimental. -- RickSperko

Yes!! I loved that part. "I told you. Sandoz Laboratories designed these tires. They're special. I could load them up to a hundred if I wanted." -- BillKelly

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