(no subject)
Feb. 21st, 2005 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
falcongrrl"All the same, you don't do it [write] for money, or you're a monkey. You don't think of the bottom line, or you're a monkey. You don't think of it in terms of hourly wage, yearly wage, even lifetime wage, or you're a monkey. In the end, you don't even do it for love, although it would be nice to think so. You do it because not to do it is suicide."
- Stephen King in his introduction to Skeleton Crew.
I've always loved this passage by Stephen King, lived by it, in fact. Writing keeps the demons away.
Except when it doesn't.
Writing doesn't always. For me personally, that's when I really start to spiral downward, when I start to scramble, to wonder if this time I'll be able to pull myself out of free fall again. If it's even possible to soar.
I wonder how it happened for Hunter S. Thompson.
Was it the slow slide into despair--or the sharp flash of a darkness across an internal landscape? Was it a lifelong battle with mental illness (largely self-medicated)? Or was it one of those random sorts of decisions that have the misfortune of becoming more permanent than necessary?
I don't know. As my friend S. knows, if he remembers this conversation, the only Thompson book I read was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I was more deeply impressed with the fact that anyone could do that many drugs and stay alive than I was with the actual prose on the page.
S. told me once that he admires Thompson. They're kindred spirits of a sort, perhaps. Honest to a fault, not afraid to be themselves in a world that's as likely to savagely kick them as to reward them for it. Two successful writers bent on self-destructing.
Selfishly, I'm glad the one I know is the one still alive.
Hunter S. Thompson, S., and me. All three of us love to write, love it in perhaps the most narcissistic way imaginable. All three of us have struggled with a painful type of self-loathing, and (without knowing for sure), I'd wager that all three of us have considered that moment of putting the gun against a part of our body, the tense weight of fingers pushing against the trigger.
Only one of us actually pulled it.
Wherever he is, I salute Hunter Thompson for being brave enough to greet life, and death, on his own terms. I hope what I will take away from his death is a determination to live, to live as myself, on my own terms, without worrying so much about if my way of life defines others' expectations of me. To be just a little selfish.
To write.
Because, you know, sometimes lighting this particular candle doesn't completely chase away the darkness. But sometimes, it's all we fucking have.
A+
- Stephen King in his introduction to Skeleton Crew.
I've always loved this passage by Stephen King, lived by it, in fact. Writing keeps the demons away.
Except when it doesn't.
Writing doesn't always. For me personally, that's when I really start to spiral downward, when I start to scramble, to wonder if this time I'll be able to pull myself out of free fall again. If it's even possible to soar.
I wonder how it happened for Hunter S. Thompson.
Was it the slow slide into despair--or the sharp flash of a darkness across an internal landscape? Was it a lifelong battle with mental illness (largely self-medicated)? Or was it one of those random sorts of decisions that have the misfortune of becoming more permanent than necessary?
I don't know. As my friend S. knows, if he remembers this conversation, the only Thompson book I read was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I was more deeply impressed with the fact that anyone could do that many drugs and stay alive than I was with the actual prose on the page.
S. told me once that he admires Thompson. They're kindred spirits of a sort, perhaps. Honest to a fault, not afraid to be themselves in a world that's as likely to savagely kick them as to reward them for it. Two successful writers bent on self-destructing.
Selfishly, I'm glad the one I know is the one still alive.
Hunter S. Thompson, S., and me. All three of us love to write, love it in perhaps the most narcissistic way imaginable. All three of us have struggled with a painful type of self-loathing, and (without knowing for sure), I'd wager that all three of us have considered that moment of putting the gun against a part of our body, the tense weight of fingers pushing against the trigger.
Only one of us actually pulled it.
Wherever he is, I salute Hunter Thompson for being brave enough to greet life, and death, on his own terms. I hope what I will take away from his death is a determination to live, to live as myself, on my own terms, without worrying so much about if my way of life defines others' expectations of me. To be just a little selfish.
To write.
Because, you know, sometimes lighting this particular candle doesn't completely chase away the darkness. But sometimes, it's all we fucking have.
A+
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-21 06:19 pm (UTC)I'm in awe, in a similar way, of people who spend their entire lives in pro-peace activism. To watch war after war go by, feeling like your voice is unheard in the bloodthirsty throng ... and yet, I know people who have done so, and still do so. Where do they find comfort that HST couldn't? I don't know.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-21 07:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-22 02:54 pm (UTC)In college, a friend and I were fond of joking "As your doctor, I'd advice you to take this..." and then laugh as we handed over a joint or bottle or shrooms or... FALILV was a great, frenzied book (though I hated the movie version). Also enjoyed "The Great Shark Hunt", and his political musings were hard hitting, if not always right on. At least he was honest and lived what he believed!
Totally agree with
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-22 06:58 pm (UTC)Hunter S. Thompson, as seen by Ralph Steadman, who illustrated "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."