You can find this line in Hunter S. Thompson’s Screwjack: “We live in a jungle of pending disasters.” There you have it. Hunter S. Thompson in one sentence — the journalistic earnestness encroached upon by a drug-induced paranoia so fraught with anxiety that it turns inside out and becomes hilarious. “Will my plane crash tomorrow? What if I miss it? Will the next one crash?” And on and on. The master of the “hysterical” voice, because his prose is fully hysterical in both senses — expressing an unhinged reaction to the circumstantial detail around him, and eliciting robust laughter from the reader. He reconciles the irreconcilable, those two zones of hysteria’s meaning, the serious psychoanalytic condition and the comical delight. I’m just never quite sure if I’m laughing with or at the deranged voice coming off the page.
shakemyheadhollow
Conceptual spaces: politics, philosophy, art, literature, religion, cultural history
shakemyheadhollow 
Reblogged this on Lost Dudeist Astrology.
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Thanks!
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There is a deranged voice inside each of us. Our laughter is probably of the nervous variety.
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The first time I read “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” I felt mainly dread, probably because my lifestyle was close to the cliff that the characters were always about to fall off. Ten years later, I read it and laughed out loud throughout, probably because my lifestyle had become … well, more boring.
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Meet On The Ledge…
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Isn’t that an old hippie-era song, Chris? I can’t remember. I know I enjoy watching Hunter S. Thompson tiptoe the ledge, but I would not want to meet him there. I admire him as a writer but can’t say I’d trust him up close and on a ledge.
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Indeed, Gary. It’s a Fairport Convention tune. Agree HST would not make a good ledge-mate. Only the best of friends can truly do that.
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Natural imagination unleashed by unnatural substances*. That simple and also can be that maniacally hysterical. Been there . . . still doing it. But, without the *training wheels anymore.
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Good for you, Karina! Like HST — and perhaps like Karina Pinella — I had my day of training wheels to rocket blast in 60 seconds. But alas those days are over, training wheels or no. Fond memories of fuel-injected hysteria, but enjoying the present calm.
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What goes up must come down or even flatten out in some cases. . .
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Jawohl! I’ve enjoyed to going up cycles and the coming down as well (in life’s big cycles, that is — in the little cycles of past hallucinogen trips, I have to say the coming down part was sometimes a drag).
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Up, yes; down, yes; flattening out? … nothing yet …
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That part is purposely blotted. Moving on forward to new adventures via story telling.
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