Head Dress Tattoo blog

I wrote the following last night around 2:00 am:

I know exactly what Hunter S. Thompson was thinking on July 13, 1957 (coincidentally, when my father was only four months old and my mother wasn’t even born yet). That is because I have Thompson’s two-volume collection of correspondence, the first volume of which is entitled The Proud Highway. I know exactly what HST was thinking approximately 51 years ago because he typed it in a letter. Most people under the age of 20 would have a similar gut response to this idea. “A letter? What the hell is a letter? Is that the same as an email?” But if you think about it, the idea of traditional correspondence is dead. Even using a word processor on a computer, no one writes or types formal, longhand letters, prints them, seals them in an envelope, and drops them in the mailbox. It’s fasters and cheaper to send said message via electronic mail.

Getting back to the point: On July 13, 1957, HST wrote to lady friend Susan Haselden, “Actually, I am already the new Fitzgerald: I just haven’t been recognized yet.” In fact, the first sections of correspondence show an unflinching self-confidence that only breaks on a few occasions. But it makes me wonder…if I start telling people I’m the new Thompson or the new Kerouac, will they start to believe it before me?

The most important realization that I’ve read so far came on 10/17/57. Thompson wrote, “I’ve strayed from all the popular ideologies of our time. To go back – or to hesitate – would be unthinkable. And yet, in going on, I can see that I shall be permanently apart from all but a small and lonely percentage of the human race, in all but the most superficial respects.” Upon reading this, I only thought, “I know exactly what you mean.”

Now I feel like I’m the first prospector to trample California, finding gold bits with every new scoop into the river. On 10/24/57, HST wrote, “Keep in mind that the ability to create is an integral part of the makeup of man. If a lack is encountered, it lies not in the ability, but in the scope of perception of one’s own creative ability.” That sentence is slightly muddled, but he is essentially saying that most people lack the means to explore their full creative potential.

When HST arrived at a small Pennsylvania mining town after an honorable discharge from the Air Force, he was extremely unsatisfied with his crummy newspaper job. He wrote on 11/29/57, “I must, in short, rely on something else: and whether I can derive any satisfaction from that ‘something else’ will be the deciding factor in whether I stay here or not. I’m speaking of my work: not just the newspaper, but other writing I can do. If a man really wanted to bury himself, I can think of no better place to do it than in Jersey Shore.” This one is almost frightening, because it so closely mirrors my constant jabbering to [my girlfriend] about how I can’t stand grad school or my job. I read and write to stay sane.

Continuing on 12/15/57: “I have found but one advantage to living here: I am completely alone. I work for three or four hours for five days a week, and then I return to my apartment – on top of Regan’s Taproom – and either read or write. Loneliness is for people who can’t see themselves except through the eyes of their compatriots, and all evidence points to the fact that I’ve passed that stage.” I must have still been in that stage when I was in Chicago. I never feel lonely in East Lansing, but I felt extremely lonesome among six million other densely populated Chicagoans during that ill-fated 14-month stretch.

Thompson also regularly bashed the ideals behind mainstream journalism. That’s one of many recurring topics that are extremely comforting to me in my uncertain state of affairs. Parts of these letters relate to various experiences that I’ve had over the past three years. What’s most striking is HST’s grasp of vocabulary. He had his characteristic sense of diction practically straight out of high school. Of course, there’s no way for me to tell how much time he actually spent on these letters, or if he ever used a thesaurus, etc.

After being fired from the Jersey Shore Herald and moving to New York City, HST wrote on 1/6/58 that he was “untempered as yet by the revelation that all literary effort is not honest, that all editors are not literary, and that the price of perception is unemployment.” He had a way of making interesting points in seemingly simple sentences. In the same letter on his NYC job search, he wrote, “I find that I’d rather build my own figurative ladder than start at the bottom rung of the existing one.”

I can’t help but feeling that I’m unraveling a mystery that is strangely made more interesting since I know much of what happens later on, including the ending. But I’m so excited to see the intermediary steps, and interested to see how HST even remained in journalism – a profession he seemed to hate – when his true passion was fiction. After realizing that HST wasn’t actually a “doctor of journalism,” I was afraid that my fondness for his work was unfounded. I’m now being reassured that that isn’t the case.

One thing I’ve been wondering is this: Can I carry on a formal correspondence of old, even if it isn’t directed specifically at anyone, or sent through the postal service? What if I wrote letters as if I intended to send them to someone, but then just posted them on my blog? Would that be interesting to anyone, in the same way that I find these HST letters interesting?
Anyways, I’m off to read some more before bed.