Hunter S. Thompson's ghost drops acid on hipsters

It's the fifth anniversary of HST's death; not that I'm keeping count, because that would be kinda morbid and weird. He's an authorial presence that's missed, though. When I first read Fear and Loathing, I was like, you can do that? I wanted to write like him; I wanted to live like him.

When Bush et al were running the country, I started losing hope in America. I wondered where were the writers like Thompson who would point out the corruption in our government, the corporate takeover of democracy, the war for oil and money, the squashing of civil liberties.

I wrote a short story about a traveling Word festival (kinda like Lollapalooza except for writers). Dave E. and Dave F.W. (rip DFW, as well = another sad, sad day for bibliogeeks) are the headliners of the show; Chuck P and Chuck D break in backstage and tie Billy C (the poet laureate) up so they can steal his spot. Lots of mayhem...but in the end, it is the ghost of HST who tells it like it really is...who keeps it real...for reals.

Here's HST's part (my homage to a great writer):

Fear and loathing incorporates “[T]he flying object maneuver” (okay, not really, but H.S.T. does fly, can fly). Coda:

I was somewhere around Baltimore when I realized I’d been left out. I remember thinking something like “I feel a bit incorporeal, but that could be all the smoke I inhaled when I was shot out of a cannon . . .” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around me and I realized it was coming from down below, so I swooped in like a bat to check out what was going on (and wished I had access to some hardcore drugs of some kind, some MDMA or even some DMT, although I wonder what a near-death experience would feel like when you’re really dead and I think that’s what my problem is, well, one of the lesser ones, anyways). I was dead and watching an audience I didn’t and couldn’t understand. I mean, this audience was eating this shit up. This audience had barely even heard of me. This audience didn’t know what it meant to never feel/be ironic.

Yeah, they were always depressed and didn’t know it; but, worse, I was somewhat depressed. And I was dead. I thought that shit went away after a while.

But, looking for the American Dream, after all these years, can make you feel that way. Still.

There were these two Okies onstage. Okay, they weren’t really Okies and they weren’t really lizards (as if the world, besides me and mine, were really split into such a simplistic dichotomy), but they definitely weren’t me. They definitely didn’t care. Or, okay, maybe it just seemed that way to me. I mean, I suffered through the death of the 60s, the death of idealism, and then I suffered through the 70s, through disco and John Denver and cocaine and all that, and the 80s and I can’t even get into that, and the 90s and politics and then, it just got worse. I always thought it’d break, like a storm or something, a Midwest tornado or a horrible monsoon (and I’d witnessed firsthand the corruption and greed and pure evil that couldn’t put New Orleans back together again or maybe I would witness, when you’re dead time travels all ways, around and through and in and out). I’d thought 1971 was a foul year, fuck.

I guess I don’t blame these two guys. The Daves. Unlike me, they’ve known all along the truth about the Dream. Their audience, too, I guess (there are very few Okies left in this world, in fact they’re near-extinct).

So, it wasn’t personal when I let the fireworks go. And it wasn’t personal when I dropped liquid Acid on the audience. It wasn’t personal when I blasted “White Rabbit” over the sound system. And it definitely wasn’t personal when I shadow-puppeted lizards everywhere. Lizards lounging. Lizards flicking their tongues. Lizards hunting. Lizards hotwiring cars then wrecking them. That was just Act One. Then I got real: Bible-thumping lizards, lizards draped in the American flag, torturous lizards, lizards stealing land and abolishing civil liberties, corporate lizards who own foreign rain forchrist’ssake, lizards wiping their ass with the Geneva Conventions, lizards bathing in oil and eating frozen embryos, lizards sitting in judgment over all, pretending to have a direct line to God. Lizards, yeah, lizards and fireworks and a crackly, popping sound system and maybe my attorney will pop up soon to throw them all out with the bathwater.

Someone’s gotta show them what’s going on, go Gonzo on them, cause it seems like no one’s paying attention. Habeas Corpus’s as dead as me; the borders are closing in.

“God’s mercy on you swine,” I shouted as I flew off to score some amyls or something. It never hurts to try, I guess, even now.


Look out for the lizards,
Ry

P.S. The story, in its entirety, was first published in Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens.

peoples bore me

but new publications do not. I get a little high every time I get a piece accepted.

I'm reeling now. I'm swaddled in Special K cotton puffs.

Chapter from Little pink babies here: http://www.bloodlotus.org/

Tell me what you think. Or not. I may still be reeling. I may be incandescent. I may be raving in  Bo Jackson's old four car garage at the end of a dead end street across from the sheriff's compound. Best place to rave in all of AL...

Don't know why anyone would bother making a "creepy" kewpie. They give me the screaming fantods just fine now.

Yours in heebie-jeebies,
Ry

And a song to march you out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCT23V7C9GU

Testing, or "more news from nowhere"

99.999993% guaranteed to make you feel smarter*

1. Everything Ryder's published and written:

a. all of it is true
b. none of it is true
c. a & b & d
d. c
e. is under the influence


2. Ryder Collins wants you

a. period

b. to worship her
c. to publish her
d. to perform your civic duties

e. to pick her up in a 70s muscle car & take her to a dive bar



3. Security question she doesn't remember the answer to

a. favorite author
b. favorite cartoon character
c. favorite drunk author
d. favorite flower
e. name of grade school


4. Author she'd want with her in a barfight          

a. Palahniuk
b. Bukowski
c. Hemingway
d. Wilde
e. Cave


5. What Ryder does when her work's rejected:

a. picks up strange men in bars and gets them to steal for her
b. sits on her Alabamy porch with a shotgun and moonshine
c. sits at a bar and steals shotguns and strange men
d. sits on strange porches and picks up normal men
e. pisses on the editor's porch a la Berryman

6. What she does when her work's accepted

a. picks up strange men in bars and gets them to steal for her
b. sits on her Alabamy porch with a shotgun and moonshine
c. sits at a bar and steals shotguns and strange men
d. sits on strange porches and picks up normal men
e. pisses on the editor's porch a la Berryman


7. Favorite saying:

a. all my bitches live in Texas
b. go ahead, fireworks
c. she doesn't have one because
         1. sayings cheapen words and turns them into cliches
         2. she doesn't have just one; she scours Urban Dictionary daily
         3. she's not hip enough and lives in Alabamy
d. skeet
e.  she doesn't remember


8. Her novel's got

a. Julie Browns on meth
b. the corporate takeover of the U.S.
c. a mama looking for her baby daddy
d. a sinister gasman named Fitzie with eyes like T.J. Eckleburg

e. all of the above; none of the above




*side effects may include: excessive thirst, excessive hunger, ennui, boredom, apathy, dipsomania, weakened eyesight, loss of inhibition, loss of control, loss of your wallet, loss of self-respect (if you're a strange man), increased appetite, existential crises, whooping cough, dry mouth, hair loss, hair growth on palms.

On writing

I ripped the guts out of a poem and handed the bloody mess to flash fiction.

I kicked the baby out so I could remember my dreams.

I stabbed you in the neck so I could use your vest as parchment.

You'll show up in the bloody mess but won't recognize yourself for botox.

The baby'll come crawling back like those babies always do.

The vest'll remember nothing except the 70s and cocaine.

The vest'll save the last dance or something else cliche.
















http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZhFIfsR-V0

Oh! Intermittent baby...

Ought Ten and I haven't forgotten you! Although if you were really a baby, dear blog, you'd be dead and I'd be in jail right now. Or on the lam. That's how neglectful I've been.

This big ether sea of Internets and you are just a tiny drop. How could I leave you alone so long?

You were riding the waves, counting the phases of the moon, watching the other blogs connect and re-connect with reader and writer alike. You didn't feel sorry for yourself; you're stoic, for a blog. You let the sea-salt air whip your face; you spied Ahab out there and tried to lure him in with porn-like words and nubile phrases.

It didn't work, but that's probably for the best. Ahab's got Issues, man.

Now you know how I feel, trying to straddle that line between self-promotion and writerly prostitution. Trying to ride that bucking horse of the writer's MARKET.

I won't go on a tirade about talent being ignored or about the corroding effects of capitalism upon art...that will just conjure up the guilt I feel for ignoring you, blog baby.

Plus, I like stuff. I'm not about to go all minimalist yet. I just bought a new pair of boots. Boots and roads are my fascinations. AMC played all the "Road to" movies a few nights ago; I remember watching them as a child.

The above paragraph, if you've been paying attention, was a very subtle plug for my not-yet published novel, Little pink babies. It's a road novel that’s got danger, sex, high speed chases, drugs, both Julie Browns (wubba wubba wubba), political espionage, bar fights, black-outs, black top, rain, sun, lost highways, lots of pop culture, gas stations, men in overalls, stuffed armadillos, random conversations overheard, a philosophical treatise on Pez dispensers, booty calls, big booties, boots, Greco-Roman allusions, and, of course, a baby.

So blog, here's my news (i.e. this is where I continue my shameless self-promotion by masquerading publications etc. as things you need to know):

I've just had two poems accepted in the shady side review.

I've entered Little pink babies in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. If you're an emerging novelist, you can enter, too.
Here's the link:  http://www.amazon.com/Breakthrough-Novel-Award-Books/b?ie=UTF8&node=332264011

The good editors over at Juked have nominated "Name game" for storySouth Million Writers Award.
Here's info on the award: http://www.storysouth.com/millionwriters.html
Here's a link to Juked:  http://www.juked.com/

Thanks J.W. Wang et al!

And you, too, (well, not you, blog, as you're not quite sentient yet) can nominate stories for storySouth's award. See the rules on their website. This is not part of my shameless self-promotion. Nominate other writers; I mean it. Let other people know about those talented writers out there in the ether-sea.

Now here's a tune to walk you out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1D9hA1tWIw


Cause I sd so,
Ry

New Online Music Mix As Independent As You Streaming 24/7 - KCRW Eclectic24

Check this out cause I sd so:


New Online Music Mix As Independent As You Streaming 24/7 - KCRW Eclectic24

Nostalgia for childhood foosball and news

Yes, foosball. I kid you not...

We had a table, growing up. I don't really know where it came from. It was always in our basement; it may still be there. It's someone else's basement now, but who knows? Perhaps old foosball tables return home to die. Perhaps they never leave us.


News: New story published on Juked.com.
http://www.juked.com/2009/12/namegame.asp

I am very much digging the stories on Juked (and not just because they published me) and also very much digging electronic submissions. Juked accepted my story pretty quickly and it was up a couple days thereafter. I like instant gratification; I like things now and I don't care how. I blame Tim Burton for not making the new oompa-loompas scary enough.

I've finished a new story and am sending it out via Interwebs.

Other news: Jason Schwartzmann lies when he's says it's always summer in Alabama. Stop lying, Schwartzmann.

My sister may be on a famous talk show in Hollywood; it has nothing to do with Jason Schwartzmann or foosball. Stay tuned.