tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11363027.post8685450868618798844..comments2024-03-28T09:14:20.479-05:00Comments on driftglass: Your Mad Man / Game Of Thrones Crossover Postdriftglasshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09379167083253389153noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11363027.post-2638244085542241642014-04-15T20:22:01.815-05:002014-04-15T20:22:01.815-05:00Excerpted from "A Generation of Swine" a...Excerpted from "A Generation of Swine" and also published in his San Francisco Examiner column...<br /><br /><br />"[....] It is an acquired taste, they say, and I have never had much luck with it. There is a lot of ritual involved, and you are always dealing with foreigners who may or may not take care of you, once the dragon begins to sing. You want to have a lot of disposable income and plenty of free time on your hands before embracing a serious opium habit. It is not a productive drug as a rule.<br /><br />But some of the exceptions have been spectacular. The poet Samuel Coleridge was one; he got into opium for a few years and wallowed crazily in the Behavioral Sink -- but while he was down there he also wrote the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan."<br /><br />In Xanadu did Kubla Khan<br />A stately pleasure dome decree:<br />Where Alph, the sacred river, ran<br />Through caverns measureless to man<br />Down to a sunless sea.<br /><br />How's that for a lead, Jack? Yeah. A lot of sober people will move instinctively to the back of the bus to make room for whatever dope fiend wrote that one. Ronald Reagan could live another 200 years and never even dream lines like that. There are some jobs you can't hire out.<br /><br />If George Bush could find a speechwriter who could write like Sam Coleridge, he would hire him immediately and never mind his bad habits. On the fast tracks where you run without brakes, all of God's creatures are welcome. Nobody ever asked Gen. MacArthur how he came up with that "Old Soldiers Never Die" speech -- yet it ranks with the highest ravings of Coleridge and Poe and whatever king-hell loon wrote the "Book of Revelation. [….]"<br /><br /> In the same column, addressing the "war on drugs", he noted that every government in China since the Chang Dynasty had sworn it would crush the opium trade, yet the price of opium on the streets of Singapore is roughly the same as in 900BC.<br /> I clipped and saved the column at the time, but that was at least four total losses of all possessions ago. So I am so glad I was able to find the above part of it on the internet, because it seemed like it would go well here.<br /><br /> -Doug in Oakland<br />dinthebeasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12941071534250216503noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11363027.post-26634204304992537092014-04-14T13:43:44.817-05:002014-04-14T13:43:44.817-05:00The meme I see all the time now, being repeated ov...The meme I see all the time now, being repeated over and over, is that the dirty hippies were wrong! wrong! wrong!...about everything.<br />...but the fact remains that on a societal continuum, all humanity experiencing total bliss all the time on one side, and everyone experiencing total suffering on the other, one group is clearly pushing it toward alleviating suffering for as many as possible, and the other is pushing twice as hard in the other direction.<br />Underestimating the powerful motivating factor of hate must have kept Hunter awake nights, after the tide rolled back out, and never came back....<br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11363027.post-66358286691573477102014-04-14T11:18:55.319-05:002014-04-14T11:18:55.319-05:00Drifty--
I've always liked that quote of Thomp...Drifty--<br />I've always liked that quote of Thompson's, althought it has always struck me as rather depressing. He was a helluva writer. He had a short passage in an article, "Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises", in the "Great Shark Hunt" collection, that made me have to set the book down. It was just a few-sentence thing about near-drowning, but having just had a near-drowning experience at that point myself, it caught me off-guard and shocked me at how precisely he had captured the feeling.<br /> ChiefDnoreply@blogger.com