that time Conan O'Brien and Hunter S. Thompson drank booze and shot machine guns together

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

This is hilarious. It’s something that feels very 1997, before Columbine and before 9/11 and before social media, when guys like Conan and Hunter S. Thompson could go out to a shooting range/bar and fire off shotguns and M60 machine guns at cardboard cutouts of baseball players and the NBC logo and set a stuffed bear on fire.

There’s something very innocent about this bizarre scene. Hunter S. Thompson is so weird and erratic and yet charming in his own way. Conan is, well, Conan. I can’t imagine any other talk show host shooting guns and drinking with Thompson like this.

It’s a glimpse into the 90s’ ethos, in a way, into that decade’s laissez faire attitude that came crashing to a halt with the school shooting in Columbine in 1999, and the birth of fear that came into its own when Islamic terrorists crashed planes into the Twin Towers in NYC two years later. Fox News was just one year old in ‘97, and while there were certainly political divides, things didn’t feel quite so awful all the time.

All that’s gone now. Now we live in a culture of fear and reprisal, censoriousness and division, feckless reactionary bullshit and aimless identity-driven radicalism. All things that have been a part of our culture from time to time, of course, but that seem more stifling now than ever before, perhaps because we’re all so tuned in all the time. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Google News, all the information and misinformation at our fingertips. It’s exhausting.

And so this weird moment between Conan and Thompson represents another age. Another era. A more innocent time—Vietnam long-over, the “communist threat” fading into memory, before Osama bin Laden became a household name.

There is, of course, nothing at all safe about this. Machine guns and whiskey is not a very wise combination. Conan looks pretty natural with a gun, though. Hunter S. Thompson, well, he’s the sort of guy gets into a shooting match with a neighbor so there’s probably no sane reason for him to have access to all these firearms. But it’s part of his charm.

Thompson died in 2005. He shot himself to death at Owl Farm, his Colorado home. You can stay there now—the Gonzo VRBO.

“He told me 25 years ago that he would feel real trapped if he didn't know that he could commit suicide at any moment,” Ralph Steadman, the illustrator whose work accompanied so much of Thompson’s writing, said of the writer after his death. “I don't know if that is brave or stupid or what, but it was inevitable. I think that the truth of what rings through all his writing is that he meant what he said. If that is entertainment to you, well, that's OK. If you think that it enlightened you, well, that's even better. If you wonder if he's gone to Heaven or Hell, rest assured he will check out them both, find out which one Richard Milhous Nixon went to—and go there. He could never stand being bored. But there must be Football too—and Peacocks. . . .”

Thompson hated Nixon, of course, calling him “a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president.” He didn’t make it to the Trump presidency, but his book Hells Angels was uncannily prescient in predicting the rise of Trumpism and an “ethic of total retaliation” that motivates it. We’ll have to add this to our Book Club.

Thompson left a suicide note to his wife titled “Football Season Is Over.”

He wrote: “No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your age. Relax—This won't hurt.”

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These are just musings. I have no direction in mind. I’m just walking aimlessly with these thoughts. The video was amusing and I wanted to share it with you, dear readers.

I have been suffering from writer’s block and a general sense of inertia creatively speaking. I think this corresponds fairly closely with my own mental health. When I sink into a depressed state, I find it hard to write, hard to think, hard to find motivation to create anything at all. I haven’t been making videos even though I know I need to. This morning, instead of getting up and working I read about Hunter S. Thompson for a couple hours.

It’s hard to find motivation to work. To cook, to clean, to workout. The flatness sets in for no particular reason and it takes a great mental thrashing to loosen the decay and break free. Sometimes this leads to me writing less thoughtful, more bitter pieces than usual.

The depression is probably just one piece of the puzzle. After all, sadness and self-loathing can often lead to creativity. I’ve written some of my best songs when I’ve been depressed.

It’s also the heat. It’s been hot and I don’t have AC and I’ll start writing and then the heat will wear me down, my brain shuts off, I find myself in a fog of sweat and it’s like I can’t even breathe properly. I can handle the heat if I’m on the beach or even outside hiking, but in a stuffy little office I just cook and dwindle. And it’s sleep, or the lack thereof, also.

Yesterday I napped for over two hours after a night of insomnia. Before the nap I wanted to write some fiction, finally, for the first time in ages, but could barely put two paragraphs together.

All of which is to say, I’ve been writing less lately and this is why. I was on vacation and came back feeling exhausted and haven’t quite been able to find my feet since. But I’ve gotten back into workout classes and I’ve been hiking (the closest thing to religion or meditation in my life) and even jogging a bit, so I think I’ll be able to shake free the malaise.

If only it would rain. That would help. My daughter just brought me some crystals to help with the writer’s block also, and I’ll take what I can get. Whatever magic or faith or good luck charm. One cannot drift for too long in this kind of fog.

As Thompson once wrote, “A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.” Indeed.

Thanks for reading and subscribing. And bearing with me when the flow of content becomes, briefly, a trickle.

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