The Gonzo Memorial Blog Post

Seven years ago the good Dr. Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide with a gun at his home in Woody Creek Colorado. Jesus God, I wish he had been able to maybe clean himself up a bit, deal with the health issues he had, and stick around for the current Presidential campaign.  As a political writer I have found him to be the best avenue to really understanding the way things are in this sick joke of a course of history we are in, at the primal level.  His predictions about many things, though often scoffed at as the ravings of a drunken malcontent have proven true.  It's understandable that most "regular" or "serious" or "patriotic" people would feel that way, but that's the point.  These people are often repulsed by any number of attitudes, physical appearances, religious foibles, ...differences... and can't really compute a person like he was.  How could a man who hated Richard Nixon and regularly used Mescaline be taken seriously?  How could he be trusted?  "Trust me, I understand these things." he would often say, jokingly, because he knew it would be seen as a joke, in correspondences with writers, politicians, news people, musicians, actors, a full array of interesting people from the full spectrum of the American experience.  He got high with Ken Kesey and the Hell's Angels-he got drunk with Patrick Buchanan.  He was allowed to ride in a limo and talk about football with the Devil himself, as far as he was concerned, his nemesis President Richard M. Nixon. He had a very unique viewpoint of how things work in politics because he saw many aspects of our society that most people never see, and could never therefore process. He really did understand those things.

One big reason I started this blog is Hunter Thompson, and let me say right off the bat that if you detect any similarity in my writing style with his, it is for good reason.  I am a chameleon.  I have no clearly defined style of my own.  When I was younger I read the writings of John Lennon, and that became my style.  Later it was Kurt Vonnegut.  In college writing classes I had to try hard not to write short, blunt sentences full of humorous musings.  Around that time I became aware of Hunter Thompson through my room mate, Barton Highfield III, who told me about this great book I'd like called "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas".  I never read it until much later, but I did really like a quote from the book that he told me, and it stayed with me all those years--"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."   Well, I was weird, in my own estimation, and the going WAS getting weird.  I had grown up in East Pediddleville, a small town on the banks of Salmon River.  Now I was living and going to school in New Haven, Connecticut, which was far weirder than Pediddleville.  There were parties, music clubs, bars with beers of the world, girls, people who participated in Peace rallies, artists, minorities, all coming at me like a whirlwind.  I wonder now how being initiated into Gonzo Journalism would have framed this new life I was living. It is important to note that this was the Reagan-Bush years, a truly harrowing time for a kid from East Pediddleville who was only just beginning to become a citizen of this land, and realizing that madmen were at the wheel. At the time my main artistic focus was writing, and my thoughts throughout the day usually took the form of a narrative.  It was something that I was very conscious of, though after school ended and I stayed in New Haven to live, the Narrative started to fade.  I was, after all, living in a house with a bunch of friends, cheap rent, playing bass in a band and playing gigs at famous clubs, meeting semi-famous touring musicians, recording scads of music on my 4-track, and only having to work part-time to get by.  The Narrative faded and the Music moved right in.

Time kept on slippin' slippin' slippin' into the future... eventually I realized that I had lived roughly the first half my life in East Pediddileville and the second half in New Haven. I continued playing music and doing music-related things, but did very little writing. At the tail end of the optimistic trade surplus Clinton years I got married, and bought a house in Pediddleville right near the idyllic Salmon River that I remembered fondly from the first half of my life. I worked for a big local company that was eventually swallowed up by a giant global company.  I was now in the Belly of the Beast as they say.  Another Bush slithered into the White House, and then 9-11 happened.

Several years later the hostile atmosphere of my workplace and the discernible decline of the American experience had me pretty well freaked.  It was as if the rottenest dystopian paranoia was actually coming to pass.  The bucolic Pediddeville was no refuge from" The Fear"--something I would have defined for me soon enough.  I was frustrated about music.  I had little free time, and what time I had I often just pissed away procrastinating.  You see,  I have the Creatism disease.  It's an imaginary psychosomatic ailment that is a combination of Creativity and Autism. I must be doing something creative at all times or it is very bad for me.  Yet, I am a champion procrastinator.  And of course the state of things in the World was sketchy, very sketchy.  We were in a war that was a preemptive strike against something that didn't exist.  Fox News, since 9-11 had somehow mesmerized  half the country into thinking it was patriotic to be Republican, that you were not a true American if you were not Republican. Crazy shit, like people boycotting mustard and ketchup.  I was getting disturbing premonitions about the future.  Somewhere in there I started reading quasi-political books that I'd get from the library.  I read Michael Moore, Greg Palast, Al Franken,  also "House of Bush House of Saud" by Craig Unger, which really floored me.  I was beginning to perceive the full scope of just how fucked we are.  It was a realization that something horribly wrong was driving everything, and that there was no way to stop it. At this time I still had not read any Hunter Thompson.  My friend Deadbob was a fan of his, I knew, but I wasn't compelled to check him out.  Even when I heard he had offed himself I didn't read anything by him.

One day I was in the library looking for something to read.  I saw a book called "Liberty And Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto" by Mark Levin.  I had no idea who he was, but leafing through it, it seemed to be a pretty reasonable book, not bat-shit crazy like Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck.  I thought maybe I'd read it, you know, for balance,... what-the-fuckever.  Something about it bothered me though.  It was the smug look on the guy's face on the book jacket.  He had the kind of expression on his face that made me feel like I was being talked down to.  It said "I am right. I am superior to all Liberals.  They are stupid anti-American fools. You should think the way I do."  Hmmm.  I just could not get over that expression on his face.  I wanted to deface it somehow, like black out the eyes with a black Sharpie.  Then a book with a bright orange spine caught my eye.  It was "Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews With Hunter S. Thompson"  Instantly I knew--I looked at Mark Levin--"Fuck this asshole, I'm going Gonzo!"

It was a good introduction to the Gonzo worldview.  In one interview he talked about how he believed that 9-11 caused " a national nervous breakdown".  I got it.  A nervous breakdown.  It really did seem like that's what it is.  In the years since then, the nervous break down has gone untreated.  Things like the Tea Party, the gridlocked congress at a 10% approval rating, the Birther Movement, Occupy Wall Street, all symptoms of the breakdown. 9-11 caused a rift at an organization I belong to that has festered and widened to this day.  I see it as a microcosmic representation.  A fractal. Just like the course of many people's lives has gone downward since then. The damage has been done and the thing will just keep careening down the road until that part that lost a few bolts starts vibrating, and then it will work itself looser and looser until it shakes violently, causing gyrations that don't belong in other parts of the machine, causing it to swerve out of control and hit the side rails, maybe spin out, then who knows?  At what point does the driver decide it's time to pull over?  Who IS the driver?

Anyway, I was talking about Gonzo Journalism...

I read everything I could get my hands on by Hunter Thompson.  The Fear.  I understood those things. His main thing was The Death of the American Dream.  He was "a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger".  All of his writing was rife with examples of perfect explanations for why I feel the way I do. Here was a person who I had very little in common with, when you come right down to it--
I don't smoke. I don't have any interest in sports.  I very rarely drink hard liquor.  I don't like cocaine.  I don't own guns or explosives. I don't gamble.  My life had been pretty tame in comparison--and yet he seemed to think the same way I do. In addition to the factual journalistic starkness, told in a wicked, at times hilarious style, there are cautiously veiled allusions in his writing to his knowledge of extreme situations most of us can only shudder to think of.  It's all the confirmation I need to be able to form an understanding of how things work--at a primal level. It had such an effect on me for a while, that I unconsciously affected quirky physical mannerisms reminiscent of Raoul Duke.  The people of Pediddleville were alien to me also.  I had been from East Pediddleville, so I didn't know many people anyway, but they seemed like Yuppies to me.  These were people who I would feel uncomfortable explaining why I would do a radio show for no money, or why I would play gigs in clubs on weeknights for no money, or why I would go snorkeling in Salmon River.  They name their kids trendy names like Madison, or Taylor, or Hunter... I fantasize about going up to one of them and saying "Hey cool, your son's named after Hunter Thompson?" to see their reaction. Probably they wouldn't know who I'm talking about.  Once in the Pediddleville Public Library I asked the Librarian if they had any Hunter Thompson and she looked at me like I was on fire. Seven years away from having lived a third of my life in East Pediddleville, a third in New Haven, and the last third in Pediddelville, I began to really miss New Haven, and with everything going on in the world, the workplace almost a parody of "Catch 22", and reading Hunter Thompson, I achieved a certain  Gonzo affinity. Somewhere in there, the Narrative came back...

The current Presidential campaign freakshow just screams for Gonzo coverage.  Sure, there's a lot more cutting edge political journalism now because of the internet, and also the extreme bullshit stream of Fox News, so some might say that somebody like Dr. Duke isn't necessary, but they would be wrong.   We are poorer for not being able to read about the 2012 race in real time, in real Gonzo. The world always needs somebody like him keeping things weird so that they can be seen clearly by the rest of us. 

I want to thank Anita Thompson for putting out that book after his death.  It called out to me and it changed my life.

How Long, O Lord?  How Long?

The fat is in the fire.

Res Ipsa Loquitur.

Mahalo.

Tank Update...Farewell Giorgio...Comstock Covered Bridge...And Mission Statement, of Sorts...

We may have our first tank fatality.  Yesterday Giorgio, the elusive bottom feeder, was seen laying on the bottom, distressed, out of sorts.  I scooped him up with the net and he barely struggled.  When I let him go he just sunk to the bottom, moved a little bit, then landed on a rock and stayed there for quite a while, just gulping every so often.  Today he hasn't been seen.  I wondered if maybe ammonia had built up and was getting to him, or if he's even eaten anything since October, when he and the other fish were put in the tank. I just figure he's been eating algae, goldfish flakes leftover from the dace, and maybe dace poop, but I don't know.  I figured maybe it's time to change the water, so I panned off about half of it, cleaned the filter, cleaned the algae smear off the back glass of the tank, and then started pouring clean water back in.  I figured Giorgio would either be seen skulking around, or that his dead body would float up from whatever rock it had settled under.  But I didn't see him, so I don't know what the story is yet. The "bug", or the caddisfly larva, also has not been seen in a few days.  Possibly it is metamorphosing, or maybe already has done so.  I have not seen a caddisfly in the house yet, so who knows?

When I was replacing the water the dace all had a great time riding the temporary downspout of water and bubbles that would come pouring into one corner of the tank every so often.  Like I've said before, these fish seem to like to have fun playing in the tank, they know me as their provider and playmate and seemed to appreciate the stimulus of the fresh column of water in a different area of their world.  With the new water they seem more energetic, so I hope it wasn't water quality that distressed Giorgio.  If he's gone, I'll miss him.  He was a cool little fish, and is probably irreplaceable. He was most certainly caught by accident when my son netted the dace.  He was so well camouflaged, that trying to find another to replace him is impossible, and only another fluke by-catch could be hoped for.

We finally got some snow in the Pediddleville area.  Today I drove by the newly refurbished Comstock Covered Bridge and saw the new bridge with a coating of new snow. The river is running very high right now.  There is very little white water, even at the cascades above the swimming hole. The bridge spans Salmon River from Pediddleville to East Pediddleville. Growing up in East Pediddleville, my friends and I used to occasionally end up at the bridge with beers or whatever, and hang out in the pitch darkness of the bridge, listening to the river rushing underneath us.  Partying in a covered bridge is not something that most kids have the chance to do.  Originally built in 1873, it is one of three existing covered bridges in Connecticut.  To me, the updated bridge  looks too modern, too square.  Maybe after the wood siding ages to a dark brown it'll be better.  Of course it was never the same after they installed the security cameras and closed it at sunset years ago before the restoration.  So it'll still be never the same.  Or, it'll still never be the same, or something...

I thought I would go over my intentions for this blog.  This blog I have described as "A Deceptively Innocuous Blog About One Of My Favorite Places On Earth, Among Other Things".  So it is about Salmon River, but the "among other things" will be appearing sooner, hopefully, than later, depending on my various motivations and lacks thereof (I am a champion procrastinator).  It may get weird.  It may get political.  It will chronicle several threads of my life in Pediddleville.  I plan to post things I've written from many years ago and of course, new stuff. Maybe some music reviews.  Maybe a somewhat fictionalized chronicle of my struggle in the workplace.  I am treading a line between yearning to play music and yearning to write and yearning to do quite a number of other things that I simply don't have enough time for.  I work full time for a soul-crushing company that drains my physical and emotional energy, and what time is left is hectic, loud, cacophonous, and fraught with reasons to avoid the things that would make me feel better.  The American Dream...

A Little Piece Of The River In My House

It is four days after the New Year, 2012, and I'm sitting in an easy chair, more or less shell-shocked, in front of the fish tank.  This tank contains no cichlids, no frilly tropicals, or even goldfish.  Inside this thirty gallon tank are locals--fish captured out of Salmon River, just a minute or so from my home.  There are eleven Eastern Blacknosed Dace (Rhinichthys atralulus) ranging in length from one to three inches.  Also there are two other inhabitants--welcome accidental by-catches.  The first is Giorgio, which I believe to be a Northern Hogsucker fry (Hypentelium nigricans), an elusive bottom feeder.  My two young sons named him after Giorgio Tsoukalos, noted proponent of the "Ancient Aliens" theory.   Those two are chips off the old block as far as sense of humor goes.  They have a list of their "heroes", or rather their favorite celebrity buffoons, which also includes Paula Deen, Guy Fieri,  Emeril Lagasse, and News Channel 8's traffic reporter Teresa LaBarbera. The second by-catch inhabitant is a caddisfly larva (order Trichoptera), a worm encased in a tube glued together from twigs and hemlock needles.  He's just known as "the bug".

The dace are very active.  They have an elongated body, similar to that of a trout.  They are a brown mustard yellow color on top, silvery yellow underneath, and have a thick black stripe lined on top with a thin yellow line running the length of their bodies.  An interesting thing about the stripe is that it fades away in the dark.  If you turn on the aquarium light late at night they will not have the stripe, just a ghost image of it that will return over the course of  few minutes.

                                                                        King Dace

 
There is little information on the internet about the dace, just little blurbs from amateur scientist types, and field study term paper sites that seem to trail off after the semester was over.  Obviously their behavior in the tank is different from that of in their natural river home.  Who are these fish?  What do they want?  I realize it sounds preposterous for me, their captor, to pose these questions.  They're wild fish, and they want to go back to their home in Salmon River.  Those are the obvious answers, but I'm not so sure...

I don't imagine they develop much of a social order in the wild.  They may inhabit the deeper water, but I think I've only seen them in the shallow pools near the river bank in small groups of no particular allegiance.  They're just hiding from predators and looking for food.


In the tank, they seem to understand that they can cruise around in the open water with no concerns about getting picked off by a bass or a snapping turtle.  They know that the big face coming at them is there to feed them, not eat them.  When they see me coming, they all come right to the front of the tank and zip around in a tight little mass of circles right in front of my face, waiting for the food to appear from above.  Could it be possible they're saying 'hello' to me?


The largest of the dace is a full-grown three inches long.  The next two largest are only a bit more than half his length.  My sons named him "Daddy",  but I secretly call him "King Dace". He is the only one of the fish that I could say, and I do say, that I have a relationship with.  He often hovers at the front of the tank, looking at me looking at him.  He'll bob up and down in the filter current and turn this way and that, looking right at me, trying to figure me out. He is clearly the leader.  The others will school up with him at times, and I've seen two of the bigger ones doing some kind of mating dance with him, swimming along together in a spiral.  Sometimes after  feeding, he'll get fierce bursts of energy and zoom around, charging the others, who make sure to get out of his way.  Generally though, the tank society is peaceful.  As I said, they appear to have developed a school, which may not have been a behavior for them in the wild. They know they are safe from predators and they don't have to look for food, so they have lots of time on their hands, er,... fins, to figure out something else to do.  I think I know what that something else is--fun.  They really seem to be having fun in their safe little world.  We collected cool blue rounded river stones and gravel from the river bed, and made little caves for them to hide in--which they often do--and they zip around endlessly to the surface, to the bottom, all around, chasing each other, following King Dace.

They were all netted by my son one October Sunday morning under the half-finished renovation of Comstock Covered Bridge.  That day was a brief hiatus from a personal nightmare caused by a perfect storm-type scenario, a coming together of Climate Change and Corporate Greed and Mismanagement that would completely disrupt my life for nearly three months.  More on that in later posts.  The point is, this river runs through my soul.  I have loved this river my whole life, and spending time there with my family makes me happy, grounds me, keeps me from going berserk, and I think that having a little piece of it in my house will help me make it through the winter.