a few slippery syllables

~tffb

So I was curious about a line from Fear and Loathing in las Vegas - after HST and Oscar Acosta "kidnap" the hotel maid, and convince her that THEY are police working undercover (and not beligerent drug addicts), Oscar escorts the maid to the door and tells her to leave a pile of towels outside the door at exactly midnight - a few other words were said, but then he says a quote that is indistinguishable from the rest of the dialogue. A confident nod and whispered line always had me wondering: "what did he say?"

I looked it up years ago, apparently he said a Mark Twain line like: "may God bless the honest men", or something to that affect.

This lead me to further reading on OZA, he disappeared in 1974 after a boat trip in Mexico saw him either overdosed or killed. He wrote books and hated HST after F&L came out, because "his best lines" were stolen by Hunter.

I liked reading the Wikipedia bit about the obituary for OZA by HST, "The Wild Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat": "Oscar was a stupid quack with no morals and the soul of a hammerhead shark". Punches the lines right through. Like a bomb going off at a mortuary.

OZA ran for Sheriff in LA in the late-60s, Thompson for Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado in 1970 - the documentary about HST in Aspen at the time is on my to-watch list. The Freak Power thing. In those times, stuff like The Weather Underground and uncontrolled-yet-times-are-too-good-to-care radicalism were going on all the time - from Zodiac to that wealthy dude's daughter knocking over banks and becoming a small time celebrity from it. Now the celebrity criminals are relegated to politicians and former finance executives.

Crime is crime, and bad is bad, but the only pertinence to it all is that we (society) actually put some consideration of consequence for "carried-away" actions by radicals. Still, the muffling of everyone via over-self-conscious social media exchanges and The Patriot Act-ism does less to stifle any ill actions, but ensures a boiled-over, pressure cooker of words and feelings takes place in many who "care" to (fall folly of) participate in social media consumption.

These days, (for me, many in my age group and of course many older/younger) have an ambivalence toward strained and restricted views/attitudes of those who aren't good with "just do it-ive-ness". In the American political spectrum, intense (and intensely opposite) ideologies pull with vigor on both sides of the aisle, for any living here it's fairly clear who is winning that tug-of-(power)-war, but nothing is ever certain, so voting matters.

If one is wishing a "point" to all this, there is none. Words to flow and ramble.