Back when I was a teenager, I listened to Hercule Poirot’s detective stories on audiobooks. Now, these audiobooks weren’t half bad. They even managed to get the tv series’ actors to record all of it and I enjoyed my time listening to them. But let me tell you what I really yearned for: to watch the tv series on some type of portable player. Seeing as this was about two years before the iPhone arriving on the scene though, that had to wait.
Nowadays of course, I can choose to not only watch the entirity of Poirot on my phone, I can do the same for almost any series imaginable. I should feel thrilled… and yet strangely enough, I’m not. It’s as if the overabundance and availability has lessened its value somewhat. Now and again, I have these type of thoughts. I go about my day and I realize how much I take for granted. Stuff which would have brought me much joy years ago, which has become the new normal somehow. It’s not a bad idea to let that sink in, once in a while. Let me encourage you to do the same. It sort of jolts you out of the daily routine of constantly getting new stuff, hoping happiness is one purchase away.
Let’s talk books now. It’s quite attempting to constantly buy new books. Have you ever noticed how easy it is, to believe you’re a better reader than someone else, just because you read a couple more books than the next guy? It’s as if it’s some type of video game: let’s quickly beat this level, so we can brag about beating the game in record time. What’s the point?
Anyways, I’ve decided to reread the books I’ve got lying around here. For the last few weeks, I’ve been reading Hunter S. Thompsons’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. I have to admit, this is only my second time reading the book. The first time through, it felt like reading the ravings a madman. With one crazy, drug-filled story after another, it all felt a little too much for me. Reading it for the second time, something changed – perhaps due to taking my time for once, instead trying to read the book as fast as humanly possible.
That’s the advice I’d give you: take your time reading Fear And Loathing. You just won’t fully appreciate it otherwise.
In case you haven’t read it, it’s about a reporter who’s supposed to write a story on a car race, but instead, he turns it into a drug-filled roadtrip. And his lawyer’s along for the ride – for some reason.
At one point, they’re as high as a kite and decide to visit a drug conference. During the break, they go talk to a cop, pretending to be police themselves. They start spinning a story of drug use gone horribly bad. It’s so over the top, that it’s cleary designed to scare the cop as much as possible, hoping he’ll pass along their made-up story to everyone he knew.
In any case, it seems to me Hunter S. Thompson was the quintessential misfit. He didn’t care much for authority or anything resembling a system. You know, it seems to me that’s a common trait shared by really good writers, not truly belonging to mainstream society. Their mind works differently than most. And in this ChatGPT era, which writes by guessing the most likely word following the previous one – meaning it gives the most likely answer, the standard answer, perhaps it’s time to become the type of person who’s ideas don’t quite follow the norm, someone who doesn’t give the expected, standard answers. Food for thought.
Yours truly
Vincent J. Dancet