"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Has it been five years? Six? It seems like a lifetime, 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. 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.
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. 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. 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."
-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas, 1971
Can days such as these ever make a return? A youth movement interested in being alive more than anything else. Whats left of it all outside of the same odd fearful fiction of those pulp books above? Did it ever really exist at all? Anymore than this ubiquitous +++GLOBAL ECOMONIC DOWNTURN+++? How much does it really cost to have a good time? What price happiness?
I'm going to write a letter to Emperor Obama to see if we can't get those good times they've got locked up in the Pentagon basement loose.
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2 comments:
I never know whether I'm being hopelessly nostalgic for days that never were, or whether I'm justified in being so pissed.
Ha. Does one cancel out the other?
I don't know how healthy nostalgia is, especially when its for something you had no part in, or maybe that makes more sense...gives you something to strive for. And of course nostalgia is skewed, in 1968, my dad was wearing a suit, winklepickers & a ducks arse like most of the working class population, the revolution wasn't televised, it was chinese whispered over a decade.
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