Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

A writer and a dad, in Denmark

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As you know, I'm reading Hunter S. Thompson's letters from 1968-1975 as I weave around Copenhagen in a jangled trip that has already involved a whole sleepless night, a three-hour ramble across the city, mostly in pre-dawn darkness and a prime-time appearance on Denmark's national cable news channel.

I'm working desperately to balance the need not to have too much of the Tubor Christmas beer and the equally urgent need not to have too little. But the most salient pattern that's developed during the visit is that the loose belt from my overcoat keeps falling off and kindly Danes have to keep presenting it to me, from behind. Once, a cab driver had to stop because the belt was flapping alarmingly against the outside of his car.

The problem with the Thompson letters is this: I am a 42-year-old dad who needs to believe as much as half the time that the world is not entirely run by a mob of pigfuckers, waterheads, greedheads and atavistic monsters who could only be brought to account by equally vicious and deranged freaks who only need "an excuse to start shooting, just enough chaos to guarantee they won't get caught."

It's a charming and convincing worldview. And really, what has changed for the better since the late 1960s? Only two things: We have hospice care now, and I forget the other thing.

Hunter S. Thompson was a dad, too, when he was writing all this. Captain Kangaroo played in the Woody Creek house in the mornings. But he was a writer first. (As both Jann Wenner and Juan Thompson will no doubt attest.)

And I'm starting to think I'm a dad first: who needs to believe that there's just enough order and justice and sanity in the world that things might work out. Not "in the end," but just long enough for my kid to be able to contend with the shit when it's her time.

A dad first—I never realized this was a choice I had to make—but a writer last, I hope.

A writer at least honest enough to be compelled to divulge that, in between reading (and agreeing with) a savage attack on America, he just spent about $140 on a Danish-made blue polka-dot dress for an eight-year-old girl.

(Oh my gosh, I wish you should see it!)

Friday Happy Hour Video: Gonzo, going bald

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Going to Copenhagen tomorrow, to do my Speechwriting Jam Session for Danish scribes attending Rhetor Logograf 2011.

For the two-b.m. plane ride, I'm taking one last volume of Hunter S. Thompson's letters. Why last? What was once a young freelance writer's inspiration has become a middle-aged dad's guilty pleasure. More of an anxious pleasure, really.

Here's Thompson, in a drunken panic, trying to be the thing he pretended to be at 28, at 43.

I'm determined not to cling to a dying branch because there's no live branch within reach and the dying branch is better than no branch at all and the dying branch got me up this far, didn't it?

Like every older, heavier man who still insists on climbing fucking trees, I need to reach for big green branches. Publicityphoto--Algren(In my most recurring dream, I am unable to bring myself to reach for something for fear I'll fall off the thing I'm holding onto.)

My writing hero Thompson never found the next branch—just kept holding, awkwardly, onto the first one until it broke and he fell out of the tree looking mostly like an asshole—and that's why Fear and Loathing in America (1968-1976) is the last batch of his letters I'm ever going to read.

Kurt Vonnegut seemed like a pretty graceful old man. Maybe I'll pick up the new biography And So It Goes in the airport bookstore, for the ride home.

Postscript: Just read the review in The New York Times: “And So It Goes depicts [the aging Vonnegut] as living in his 'own private rain,' stuck in a 'hexed' second marriage, nursing grudges and running out of writerly inspiration."

Maybe Robin Leach has a book out?

Reading, for medicinal purposes

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Over the weekend I was reading The Proud Highway, the first volume of the letters of Hunter S. Thompson. These are from the 1960s, before Thompson became more of a character than a writer. YoungHunter

"Haven't you read those letters before?" my wife asks me, hand on hip.

Which is like telling Popeye, "Haven't you eaten spinach before?"

As a freelance writer, I need to read Hunter S. Thompson's letters periodically.

I need to read his angry missives to agents and publishers and eat his belief that the danger isn't running out of people who will publish your work, but being overwhelmed by publishers who would keep you slaving away on the edge of poverty.

I need to drink this: The freelancer's life is necessarily an adventure, and the moment you humorlessly mutter, "There must be an easier way to make a living," you have missed the point by a mile, and a year.

I need to inhale (and hold in my lungs) Thompson's drive to say something impertinent and true, his demonstrated preference to fail hideously rather than to succeed conventionally, his energy, energy, energy.

It turns out he took his own inspiration from a writer named Lionel Olay, who Thompson considered "the ultimate free-lancer."

"He wrote for Cavalier, the Free Press, and anyone who would send him a check. When the checks didn't come he ran grass to New York and paid his bills with LSD. And when he had something that needed a long run of writing time he would take off in his Porsche or his Plymouth or any one of a dozen other cars that came his way, and cadge a room from Mike Murphy at Hot Springs, or in his Brother Dennis's house across the canyon. … Now and then one of the New York editors would give him enough leeway to write what he wanted, and a few of his articles are gems. …"

Olay died of a stroke when he was about my age. I can't be doing that: I got a wife, I got a kid, I'm too old for LSD.

But I will, occasionally, furtively, drop a half a hit of HST.

Readers, what writers do you read over and over, and what are you trying to fix?